Bower is a curses frontend for the Notmuch email system. I wrote it for me, but you might like it, too.
bower is written in Mercury.
See some screen shots.
bower makes use of standard Linux utilities, so will likely require some work to work on other systems.
At compile time:
- Mercury compiler (20.06 or later, including release-of-the-day); currently available at http://dl.mercurylang.org/index.html
At run time:
- notmuch
- ncurses with wide character support
- gpgme (GnuPG Made Easy)
- GNU coreutils: base64
- SMTP client to send messages (configurable)
- file(1) to detect MIME types when adding attachments
To create a man page from this readme, you will need:
- pandoc universal document converter
- awk
Firstly, to install Mercury from source you can follow these steps:
tar xf mercury-srcdist-VERSION.tar.gz
cd mercury-srcdist-VERSION
./configure --prefix=/path/to/mercury
make install PARALLEL=-j6 LIBGRADES=
export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/mercury/bin
where PARALLEL=-j6 reflects the number of parallel jobs to use.
With Mercury installed and mmc
in your PATH, run:
make
You may want to edit src/Mercury.options
to suit your system.
If successful, you will get a binary named bower
.
To generate a man page, run:
make man
This will produce bower.1
for installation into your man
search path.
Packages are also available in Alpine Linux, AUR, Gentoo, GuixRUS, and Nixpkgs.
You can configure bower by creating a file in one of the following locations, in order of priority:
-
the path specified in the environment variable
BOWER_CONFIG
(if set) -
the path
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bower/bower.conf
(if the environment variableXDG_CONFIG_HOME
is set and non-empty) -
the path
$HOME/.config/bower/bower.conf
(if the environment variableHOME
is set) -
a path
$basedir/bower/bower.conf
where$basedir
is an element of the colon-separated list given in the environment variableXDG_CONFIG_DIRS
(defaults to/etc/xdg
)
The details of the configuration file are given in bower.conf.sample
.
Bower is designed such that it can be run on the local machine but call out to notmuch on a remote machine (that holds your mail) via ssh. The advantage is that you can start helper programs on the local machine (e.g. a web browser or image viewer), and add or save attachments on the local filesystem, even if your mail archive is stored on a different machine.
Bower also keeps some centralised information in the notmuch configuration file. You may wish to tell bower about your Maildir hierarchy, namely where to place draft and sent messages. The defaults are given here:
[bower:maildir]
drafts_folder = Drafts
sent_folder = Sent
It is recommended that your .notmuch-config
file contains at least
these search exclusions:
[search]
exclude_tags=deleted;draft
bower [OPTION]... [SEARCH-TERM]...
bower [OPTION]... mailto:MAILTO
Run bower
to start, optionally passing a list of initial search terms.
If no search terms are provided, bower will use the search string ~default
,
where ~default
is a search term alias (see below). By default, ~default
is equivalent to searching for messages from the last week
but you are free to change it.
Running bower
with a single mailto:
argument will go directly to the
compose screen.
The only options supported so far are -h, --help
and --version
.
There are two main views: the index, and the combined thread/pager.
This view shows the notmuch search results for the current query. The keys are:
j, k next, previous thread
g, G first, last thread
[, ] scroll half page up, down
Tab, comma go to next unread thread
Enter open thread
Alt+Enter open thread in obscured mode
l, ~ change search terms ("limit")
Alt+Key invoke search term alias named by Key
= refresh search results
z toggle authors column
/, ? search for string within results
n skip to next search result
N skip to next search result in opposite direction
U toggle 'unread' tag on current thread
F toggle 'flagged' tag on current thread
a toggle 'inbox', 'unread' tags on current thread (archive)
d set 'deleted' tag on current thread
u unset 'deleted' tag on current thread
$ apply '+spam -unread' tags on current thread
+, - add/remove arbitrary tags
t select/unselect thread
T unselect all threads
' bulk tag changes on selected threads
" same as ' but retain selections afterwards
m compose new message
r reply to sender
e reply to everyone
L reply to list
R recall postponed message
@ add to address book
| pipe thread IDs to command
q quit
Pressing Alt+Key will treat Key as a single character search alias that is invoked directly without further prompting (see below for search term aliases). This provides a convenient way to switch between frequent queries.
This view pages through an entire thread. The keys are:
j, k next, previous message
g, G first, last message
b, space previous, next page
\, Enter previous, next line
[, ] previous, next half page
Tab, comma go to next unread message
p go to parent message
S skip quoted text
O toggle ordering of messages (threaded or flat)
M toggle obscuring of unmatched messages
= refresh search results
/, ? search for string
n skip to next search result
N skip to next search result in opposite direction
J mark current message read and go to next message
K mark current message read and go to previous message
U toggle 'unread' tag on current message
^R remove 'unread' tag on preceding messages
F toggle 'flagged' tag on current message
a toggle 'inbox', 'unread' tags on current message (archive)
d add 'deleted' tag on current message
u remove 'deleted' tag on current message
$ apply '+spam -unread' tags on current message
+, - add/remove arbitrary tags
t select/unselect message
T unselect all messages
' bulk tag changes on selected threads
" same as ' but retain selections afterwards
r reply to sender
e reply to everyone
L reply to list
W forward message
B resend message to another address ("bounce")
E use current message as a template for a new message
R recall postponed message
@ add to address book
v highlight next visible attachment or URL or folded text
V highlight next visible attachment or top of message
s, w save highlighted message/part to file
o open highlighted message/part/URL with external program
z cycle alternative parts / toggle inline display / decrypt
Z toggle inline display of part / decrypt
z, Z expand/collapse folded text
y verify signed part
| pipe thread or message IDs to command
i, q return to index
I return to index, removing 'unread' tag on all messages
A return to index, removing 'inbox' and 'unread' on messages
The 'o' command, which opens parts and URLs, takes a command using Unix shell quoting syntax. If the command ends with an unquoted '&' character then the command will be run in the background.
Note: forward (W) and edit-as-new (E) currently will not create a proper
message template for messages that are manually decrypted in the thread view.
A workaround is to set crypto.decrypt_by_default = true
in the bower
configuration so that encrypted messages are automatically decrypted upon
opening a thread.
In "obscured" mode, messages unmatched by the search query in the index view will be displayed in a different colour, and ignored by navigation keys (e.g. j, k, and string search). The mode can be toggled with the 'M' key.
The l
(limit) command in the index view slightly extends the notmuch search
term syntax with these macros:
~A disable default cap on number of search results
~F tag:flagged
~U tag:unread
~D tag:deleted
~d DATE..DATE
~d DATE..
~d ..DATE
~d DATE
By default, a maximum of 300 search results will be displayed. Add ~A to the search string to get all results.
The ~d syntax passes dates through to notmuch as a "date:" range;
see notmuch-search-terms
(7) for the date range syntax.
You may use curly brackets to surround date strings containing spaces.
The single date form ~d DATE is equivalent to ~d DATE..DATE.
Some examples:
~d 2011-06-01..
~d {2 weeks ago}..{last week}
~d yesterday
In addition to the built-in macros, bower will try to expand tokens of the
form ~NAME
in two ways:
-
if there is a search term alias called
NAME
then the token will be replaced with its expansion -
if there is a notmuch named query called
NAME
then the token will be replaced withquery:NAME
Search term aliases are defined in the notmuch config file in a section
called [bower:search_alias]
. Expansions may make use of other
(non-recursive) expansions. For example:
[bower:search_alias]
default = ~lw
lw = ~d {last week}..
2w = ~d {2 weeks ago}..
lm = ~d {last month}..
ly = ~d {last year}..
notmuch = to:notmuch
bower = ~notmuch AND bower
bower_recent = ~lm ~bower
As mentioned earlier, the ~default
alias sets the initial search query
if you run bower
without command-line arguments.
The differences between search term aliases and notmuch named queries are:
- search term aliases are specific to bower
- search term aliases may use bower-specific syntax, and refer to other search term aliases
- named queries are stored in the notmuch database instead of the notmuch config file
You can tab complete search term aliases and notmuch named queries.
Tag modifications in the index view are (mostly) performed asynchronously to minimise stutter. Remember to quit properly using 'q' to ensure all tag modifications are completed before exiting. Tag modifications will be retried a limited number of times on failure, e.g. because the notmuch database is locked (this was a problem with old notmuch versions).
Unlike the index view, tag modifications in the thread/pager view will only applied upon returning to the index view. If bower is terminated before returning to the index view then any tag modifications made in the thread view will be lost.
By default, bower will call notmuch count
every 60 seconds in both the index
and thread views in order to notify you of new unread messages matching the
search terms in the index, or new messages in the current thread. You can
change the polling frequency or disable it with the configuration option
ui.poll_period_secs
.
You can also configure a command to run when new messages are found
using the command.poll_notify
option.
Bower can use notmuch address
command to look up email addresses where
required, e.g. when composing a new message. Only addresses that appear
in the From
header of messages from the last year will be considered;
this restriction improves performance and avoids finding stale email addresses.
Address aliases can also be kept in the notmuch config file in a section
called [bower:addressbook]
. For example:
[bower:addressbook]
someone = Someone <someone@example.org>
someoneelse = someoneelse@example.org
You can add to the address book using '@' in the index or thread views.
Tab completion will prefer address aliases over addresses found by
notmuch address
.
You can send mail through one or more accounts defined in bower.conf
.
An account is selected by matching the From address on the message to the
address on the account. Bower performs two steps when sending a message:
-
Run the configured
sendmail
command with the message on standard input. The command should pass the message onto an SMTP server. If thesendmail
command fails (exits with non-zero status) then the message is considered not sent, and the next step does not run. -
Run the "post-sendmail" step.
The default behaviour (if
post_sendmail
is not set) is to usenotmuch insert
to add the message to the mail store, and to the database with thesent
tag and without theunread
tag.Otherwise, if
post_sendmail
is set to a non-empty command then the command is run with the message on standard input.Otherwise, if
post_sendmail
is set to the empty string then no command is run.
If both the sendmail
and post_sendmail
commands will run on the same
remote server then there is a slight inefficiency because a single
message would need to be transferred to the remote server twice.
If that is a concern, you could combine the two steps into a single script
to be run at the sendmail
step, and disable the post_sendmail
command.
Bower can produce encrypted and/or signed PGP/MIME messages through GnuPG. Message decryption and signature verification are performed by notmuch. It is up to the user to configure GnuPG on the machines running bower or notmuch.
Peter Wang novalazy@gmail.com
Feel free to contact me with feedback or suggestions.