I’d like a terminal email client inspired by vim’s usual keys and behaviour. I didn’t particularly like mutt’s default keys.
Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#42I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat.
But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, perhaps. Concise commands for viewing folders, threads, searching, composing etc. Which integrate well with grep, xargs etc. for bulk operations.
Rather than IMAP support, the heavy lifting of sync'ing Maildir folders could be done by dovecot, with searches by mairix.
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#43The problem is the HTML Emails I annoyingly get sent by non-tech people.
In Mutt I auto-view those with w3m. The main limitation is that you can’t reply while preserving the HTML (at least I know of no TUI HTML mail editor).
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#44I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat. But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, p…
You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) that might be of interest.
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#45I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat. But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, p…
Ironically enough (as it's not CLI, merely TUI), I find notmuch interface for emacs to fullfill this criterion.
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#46I get excited when I hear of something like this, but then it often turns to indifference when "terminal" UI is shoe-horning GUI elements into large grids of UTF8. There's a time and place for GUI if that is the motivation, and for anything short of that my Pine/Alpine familiarity is going to be hard to beat. But what would be interesting is "command-line" for a modern email client. Similar in spirit to the old mh, p…
You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze ( https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze ) that might be of interest.
I heard of notmuch, but I remember I dismissed it for whatever reason. Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line.
However, mblaze looks very promising. Thanks for that. It's almost literally what I had in my minds eye. It's light on dependencies and also packaged for Alpine Linux which is a good sign, and means I'm already trying it! :)
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#47I could welcome any comparison with aerc ( https://aerc-mail.org ).
Does aerc support notmuch?
Yes, I'm using it with notmuch, and it works reasonably well. A couple of caveats:
- If you want to save outgoing mail, you need to include your own mail-sending script (mine is below). This is because aerc treats the notmuch backend as read-only.
- For the same reason, you can't postpone messages with the notmuch backend.
- I find it a little annoying jumping between search queries. Basically, I have to type out the new query each time. The aerc notmuch backend treats notmuch queries like folders, but it instantly forgets the previous "folder" existed when you go to a new one.
It probably wouldn't be too hard to fix these; if I stick with aerc I'll probably try eventually.
My mail-sending script; tested only on OpenBSD:
#!/bin/sh
#
# Save a copy of an email in Sent, then send it with sendmail.
set -e
TMP=$(mktemp -d)
cat > "$TMP/message"
notmuch insert --folder=Sent Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#48Does anyone know the status of gitea federation yet? This is the first repo I've seen in the wild that uses it But my god this client is beautiful
> And since I get asked this a ton, these federated features like federated following are (obviously) not in Gitea right now, but will probably be released in Gitea 1.18 in October.
According to this blog post https://a.exozy.me/posts/gitea-actually-joins-the-fediverse/
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, that's fair. I was questioning the reasonableness of having 17k emails but you're right, the software should be able to support it.
What are you doing with your old emails? Do you delete them? Or have you found a method to archive them that produces few folders with few emails in each and that works consistently over the decades? Because I haven't, and having everything in one folder works just fine with the clients I use.
I use two folders, inbox (currently active mails, also sent ones) and trash, which is the ever growing pile of mails.
Most importantly is the use of a mail indexer (notmuch currently) for searching and getting virtual mailbox viewes.
Re: Meli – email client in the terminal, in the spirit of mutt
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze ( https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze ) that might be of interest.
I heard of notmuch, but I remember I dismissed it for whatever reason. Perhaps as it's a text UI, rather than command line. However, mblaze looks very promising. Thanks for that. It's almost literally what I had in my minds eye. It's light on dependencies and also packaged for Alpine Linux which is a good sign, and means I'm already trying it! :)
Notmuch is fully command line, there are any number of traditional cli commands, it’s a suite ala git but not a tui or anything:
https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/
See for example notmuch-search and notmuch-tag.
Maybe you are thinking of notmuch-emacs or some other full blown client. There are many https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/
Notmuch’s core is largely in C and I believe the only serious dependency is Xapian.