I have to use Outlook (web version) for my work, and I've recently got pretty good at managing my inbox by tagging my emails and shooting them straight to the Archive folder instead of trying to figure out precisely where they should live. It's so much easier for my brain to handle, but I really think it only works for me because Outlook makes it so easy with default keyboard shortcuts. Highlight an email, press "c," start typing the tag name, Outlook filters all my tags down as I type, I hit enter on the right one, "esc" to close the tag list, then "e" to Archive it. I never have to touch the mouse and I can just fly through all my bullshit while knowing I could easily find it later if need be. It's awesome.

I want to start doing this for my personal email. I'm using Thunderbird right now. It does have a tagging feature but it's soooo primitive and frustrating compared to Outlook. The only way to tag an email with a keyboard shortcut is to know the Number of the tag. That'd be no biggie except... there's no ability to manually re-order the tags, so once you build your muscle memory, if you have to add a tag later, you get to re-learn the order, because Thunderbird always puts the most recently added tag at the top of the list. Gross.

I searched around the net for a while today and found a lot of people with the same complaints about Thunderbird. I saw a guide some enterprising soul wrote on how to hack the Thunderbird Config Editor to organize and sort tags in your preferred order, but it looks fuckin brutally painstaking and while I have the ability to do this, I have not the patience. Link for the curious: https://superuser.com/questions/1543390/how-do-i-reorder-tags-in-thunderbird

If there's some trick or extension that makes Thunderbird behave like I want, I stopped mining and turned around before I found it...

I turn now to the lovelies here at the bearsite for help. Are there any FOSS email clients out there with a tagging system like Outlook's (i.e. based on text matching)? I wanna rock with keyboard shortcuts, I don't wanna be a mouse toucher. I could settle for a system like Thunderbird's where the keyboard shortcut relates to the number of the tag in the list, but only if it lets me manually order them without having to play Hackerman.

Much love,

decaptcha