[freedomben]

So mutt is still receiving releases? That's neat. I may have to revisit and see what's new in 2.0.

I went through a CLI-only phase where I didn't use a desktop environment. My "DE" was just tmux in a pseudo-terminal. The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat. Mutt was a critical member of the toolkit and I have fond memories of hyper productivity. Search was crap though.

If you're thinking about doing this, I recommend trying to live in a VM running Fedora Server or Arch or Ubuntu Server or something. If you find yourself unable to use a CLI browser for some reason, at least you don't have to tell work "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>" (that doesn't go over well).

[k2enemy]

I you revisit, be sure to check out notmuch as the search backend. It is super fast and has a nice and powerful search syntax.

[1] https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/

[rjzzleep]

I recommend you take a look at neomutt. Neomutt integrates notmuch by default and has a lot of the patches that mutt never merged in it.

https://neomutt.org/feature

https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt

[em-bee]

how is the folder handling with notmuch in mutt?

i use sup (which is where notmuch came from) because it provides on-the-fly virtual folders where emails match a search query or a tag. i can also open multiple folders at once and switch between them without loosing state. it's been a while, but when i last used mutt it could not do that

[k2enemy]

Mutt cannot do multiple folders and keep state.

Coincidentally, I used to use sup and it is my favorite mail client that I've used. At the time there was no way to sync changes back to maildir or some format that IMAP could sync. Is that still the case?

[rakoo]

No, maildir syncback has been merged for some time already (https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Using-sup-with-ot...): changes in sup are sent back to maildir, which is synchronized back to IMAP as usual !

[em-bee]

it is worth pointing out that very recently sup development has picked up again by a few contributors

[thom]

I still regularly do work without an X server booted up, and I feel it's a tremendous aid to my focus and productivity. And to an extent my happiness too: I feel like I'm using a computer again, something I've loved since I was very young, and which lately has taken a back seat to apps (mostly web-based) built around the metaphor of being in a series of crowded, noisy rooms.

[nextos]

Mutt, plus a notmuch backend, has excellent search capabilities. Operators meet or exceed what Gmail offers both in terms of speed and features.

Neomutt probably has better integration. I've never tried because I switched to the Emacs Notmuch MUA package.

I find the integration of Emacs packages much better than ncurses CLIs which, unlike non-interactive Unix applications, tend to compose badly. They are little silos.

Mutt has an excellent UI design, though. Once learnt, it's really fast to use.

[dm319]

Search was crap?! It's one of the main reasons I stick to mutt - being able to rapidly search through all my emails using several criteria is great. I find gmail and outlook terrible in comparison. I also have not-much configured, but I find I don't need it too often (just when searching the body text).

[kbenson]

I also have fond memories of mutt, and some of my coworkers still use it on our IMAP server. I've vacillated over the years between mutt, Thunderbird, and Gmail depending on the company and capabilities. Recently I've played with using Outlook desktop (after a week or two with Outlook for the web) because of better teams and meetings integration (it's an ISP, we have our own HA dovecot cluster and an exchange system for employees, but we can get mail in either reliability with some procmail and exchange rules). The only thing Outlook has over Thunderbird or mutt are the aforementioned exchange integrations, buttery smooth cursor movement (it had been so long since I used MS Word I forgot about that, and it's nice), and the ability to set conditional rules to not just set color on messages in a folder, but font and font size. Having unread items not just a different color but bold and bigger is pretty cool. Not sure how mutt would support that, but I think some newer terms might open up the capability...

[apatters]

I tried to go CLI only at one point but never quite got there.

It did, however, teach me a healthy appreciation for the benefits of pushing parts of my workflow into the terminal whenever possible. The terminal is distraction-free, highly scriptable, and your mode of interaction is always the same (type things!). Afterwards I ended up switching to Xubuntu + i3wm and never looked back. I've still got a copy of Windows 10 on a random machine and I interact with Macs occasionally, and it really seems like little of importance has been introduced to the graphical desktop paradigm since at least Windows 2000.

[RMPR]

> If you find yourself unable to use a CLI browser for some reason, at least you don't have to tell work "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>" (that doesn't go over well).

Can relate so much. Tried to go CLI only, switched back, but I settled to use a WM (sway).

[quietbritishjim]

> "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at <thing>"

Sorry if I'm missing the point, but why does using a terminal program require a whole separate OS? Or, conversely, why does using a graphical program force you to ditch all your terminal programs? Couldn't you just switch to a separate pseudo-tty, or even just use a maximised terminal window? You can switch between terminal programs with the usual tmux key bindings while still being able to "exit" to the GUI when needed.

[swiley]

This was the reason for me personally switching from alpine to mutt. One day I realized the only place I could find a copy of the source was on my own harddrive and that's when I bit the bullet and started figuring out the mutt UI/config.

[adiM]

I started with pine about 20 years ago and have been using it since then (through the pine -> alpine -> re-alpine -> alpine cycle) but have never used Mutt. What are the advantages of mutt compared to alpine?

[csomar]

> The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat.

These are web apps? You should be able to have CLI-work style and still browse the web. Use something like Vimium for Firefox and a WM.

[OJFord]

It sounds ('CLI-only') like GP I was trying to exclusively use Lynx or similar, no GUI at all, browser or otherwise.

[imroot]

I use weeslack for my Slack integration, and still live just about 100% in the terminal.