Skip to content

MUA changed

Posted by Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum on

Finally, after (i think) 13 years, i switched my mail user agent from pine to mutt. Not that i like the latter more, it has other problems and/or ways of handling mails which i don't like. But the (non-existent) pgp support in pine drove me crazy. After configuring a while around, more than 300 .muttrc config lines and some perl scripts to create send-hooks from nicely configured roles later i have almost the same behaviour like before. Some questions remain:

  • why does mutt jump to the next message in the pager, if i scroll down with the cursor keys at the end of the message? And how can i switch off this annoying behaviour? set pager_stop=yes
  • default colors (at least on my system) are ugly as hell, i like my green on black terminal but i don't have a great choice in colors here, mutt has only 10 or so colors ...
  • why is the send-hook not able to match the whole header (~h)? This is especially stupid because some of my former roles matched on mailinglists or email addresses only used as a target or some other header stuff. According to one comment here the 1.5 devel versions have a reply-hook ... but it's still devel.
  • why is there no possibility to stop hooks after a match?
  • $folder is set, but if i try to save a mail, mutt starts in ~, not in $folder, which would be the logical start point.
  • why does mutt jump over deleted mails in the index and why is there no config option to switch this off? Even pine has this. Use 'next-entry' and 'previous-entry' instead 'next-undeleted' and 'previous-undeleted', which is the default.
  • setmenu_scroll=yes is nice, but pine offers additional usability by not scrolling at the last line but instead you can see the next (configurable) number of mails during the scroll. Use 'set menu_context=number'.
  • pine does not only offer (a better) help for the current function or view, it also has links to other topics and to the index.
  • character encoding in the index does not work properly (yes, i tried every trick on the charset wikipage).
  • to be continued

Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

Michael Elkins on :

Andreas, some of your questions are just a matter of configuration: bind index,pager j next-entry bind index,pager k previous-entry Will cause 'j' and 'k' not to skip deleted messages. By default, these are bound to 'J' and 'K'. you probably want reply-hook instead of send-hook if you are wanting to match ~h on the message header. send-hook matches the envelope of the new message you are sending. * set menu_context=3 Will cause 3 additional lines to be displayed when the menu scrolls.
Comments ()

Andreas on :

Hello Michael, thanks for this hints, i incorporated them into my config.
Comments ()

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.
To leave a comment you must approve it via e-mail, which will be sent to your address after submission.
Form options