![]() ![]() That meant doing a brew install mutt (thank goodness for Homebrew, which has formulae for just about every piece of software I needed to put this all together) and setting Mutt up to talk to my Gmail account over IMAP. Nevertheless, I wanted to start out my experiment by making the smallest possible investment. He’s not alone in doing this either ( here is one high-quality example), and I can only assume that not everybody recommending a combination like this is doing so just because they read Steve’s blog. Now, Steve recommends a complicated constellation of multiple programs, of which mutt is but one. Unlike his post, I’m not going to tell you how to set things up (you can see my set-up here), but I will share some thoughts on what the process and the result have been like. ![]() Like his other pieces, it was well-written, beautifully presented, and extracted from real experience. As Steve already had some cred, I knew I could take "The Homely Mutt" seriously. Steve’s got some fantastic and oft-cited posts on his blog, including the well-known " Coming Home to Vim" and " A Modern Space Cadet", which have been highly influential within the command-line nerd community. Nevertheless, maybe it was time for another look, so I started to look around, and found this great post by Steve Losh. It sure is fun, but all that meta-programming, duck-typing, total lack of static verification, and relatively lack-lustre performance, make me leery of relying on it for mission-critical applications. ![]() I’ve previously compared coding in Ruby to "driving without a seatbelt in a rubber car". I briefly downloaded and played with it, but it didn’t seem stable enough. The whole thing is basically a love song dedicated to the terminal.Ī few years ago, people started talking about Sup, a command-line client apparently engineered to cope with the voluminous quantities of email that services like Gmail encourage you to accumulate (because they give you effectively unlimited storage, encourage you to archive rather than delete, and they provide fast search to make it all tenable). I have a YouTube channel on which I’ve published about 45 different screencasts on Vim, so far. Compared to other email clients, it’s a pretty ugly program, but it was fast and it did a great job of ensuring that only the things I actually needed to see and act on wound up in my inbox. It ended up becoming my iOS mail app of choice, but I stuck with Gmail for the web.Īt work, we don’t use Gmail, so I kept using Apple’s Mail.app for that, until a colleague recommended MailMate to me for its amazingly powerful "rules" system. This is a dumbed down version of the email concept, but it works great for the dumbed down interface of the modern "smartphone". Google made a great iOS app for Gmail as well.Ī bit later, Google came out with Inbox. The Vim-esque keyboard shortcuts and expressive, fast search were empowering. I really appreciated the ability to access it from any machine and have it behave identically everywhere. The web browser eventually became the primary interface to my personal email. I ran my own mail server for years, and when I needed to access it in a web-browser I used SquirrelMail.īy 2011, I’d finally gotten over my mistrust of Google, given in and moved my self-hosted email over to Gmail. There was probably a brief stint with Thunderbird in there at some point. I remember using Eudora, Outlook Express, and Mail.app. Since then, however, I’ve gone from GUI email client to GUI email client. The program is still being slowly developed, and the release (March 24, 1999) of elm 2.5 is promising. The last time I seriously used a command-line email client was in the 1990s on the university Unix machines, and if I recall correctly it was elm. So, how’s it going? At this point I am about 90% certain that I can make this thing - Mutt - work, so I figured I’d put down some thoughts about the experience. If you take a look at my dotfiles, you’ll see that I’ve moved a bit past the "temptation" phase deep into "experimentation" territory (getting this far at the time of writing). Still tempted to give a command-line email client a try. ![]()
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