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
I have heard of emacs but never used it... which is funny bc it sounds like it's right up my alley. The main piece of software I use for my job has heavy keyboard shortcut integration that most people in my line of work don't even know about, and would never use even if they did, so I get to look like a goddam wizard to them. The rest of the job-specific work is all in a terminal emulator running a system that's about as old as emacs itself... so I'm very comfortable with this in principle. Having inline images would actually be a big upgrade over what I'm used to, haha.
I'm not sure why I never gave emacs a chance, probably never realized I actually had a specific use case for it, so thank you very much for the suggestion. I'm not scared of writing or copying code but thanks for the warning. Do you find this tagging setup requires much upkeep? I don't mind putting in work to set something up, but I don't want to have to fuss with it very much later. That's what makes me leery of the Thunderbird config hacking... every time I wanted to add a new tag, I'd potentially have to go back and re-assess ALL the tags. Not my idea of a good time.
Side note: You're welcome! The tags (or Categories as I think Outlook calls them) are probably the only thing I actually like about Outlook. Protip: you can Favorite searches for your tags to get the best of both worlds of tags and folders.
When people see me code or write emails or browse my filesystem or do basically anything that isnt in a web browser, this is their reaction lol.
I mean, its a big investment. The tutorial is super helpful, but its definitely an investment into learning an ecosystem. Word of advice: dont go for fancy things like spacemacs or doom or cua keys or any of that. Start with plain old emacs. Craft a config based on what you use. I can recommend packages, but the big frameworks IMO make emacs more opaque and its important to be able to understand the packages youre using/installing.
Tbh, I dont use it. I find mu is good enough at filtering all my emails (only about 4k emails tho, not very many) that I dont need the tags. But, I can link the manual and the tagging repo and you can look at what might go into setting them up
This won't be how it works. From reading the tagging source code and docstrings, it has a list of tags (which can either be flags, or mutually exclusive categorical tags) which are added/removed from a piece of mail. Tags have an associated keybinding to add/remove them, and I would be amazed if it doesnt provide an auto complete list (look up "emacs vertico orderless marginalia" in YouTube or something for an idea of how emacs prompts the user). The big limitation of this library is that it doesnt sync the tags with the IMAP server, theyre only stored locally. You could probably do something with the mail headers and sync back to the IMAP server, but I'm not really sure. IMAP is an RPC protocol tho I think?
I will say, plain old mu4e has labels and headers and actions, which might be enough for what you want to do!
I'll give some links later on in my day ^^
So, emacs. If you feel like it, install emacs and run the tutorial. Try not to use the mouse, and try to do it vanilla. No video here, cause its not gonna be able to communicate the tutorial and what it looks/feels like.
For vertico, this video does a great overview of all the different ways to present completions in vertico (a completion extension based on the built in emacs completion). Given that tag completion is important to you, I figured this would be useful/worthwhile. It also gives you a bit of a feel for how emacs looks/operates.
Emacs packages (like vertico) are just code implementing some sort of something. Orderless makes it so that you can match against split text "orderless"-ly, e.g. match the string
foo-bar-bazby typingbar baz foo. I find it super useful.Marginalia (mentioned in the above vid) is super useful, and kinda just an "install and forget" package for me.
Theres tons more useful packages, but I dont want to overwhelm you.
Once you've at learned the keybindings
C-n,C-p,C-f,C-b,C-v,M-v, andM-x(covered by the first part of the tutorial iirc), then go ahead and install mu (and external package) and set up some sort of something to fetch mail locally. I use offlineimap I think, but theres several ways to fetch mail.Then grab the mu4e package. This is sometimes distributed separately from emacs, in which case there will be instructions on how to load it and set it up (
requireit, in emacs speak). Depends on your os and whatnot.Here's a vid on mu4e with HTML emails.
I'll send more later, but the vids should give u an idea of using emacs and what its like :) check out the vids, maybe install and play around with emacs, and yea! I'm not immediately available but I enjoy emacs and am happy to yap about it lol
This is lovely, thank you so much! Now I just need to make time to play around! Send as much or as little as your capacity allows, I appreciate every bit. Orderless stands out to me, that's super useful and appealing. Can't wait to try this out.
Ahhhhh it makes me happy to help, emacs is something that really works for my brain and I love being able to share about it. Genuinely, if you have questions about it dont hesitate to ask
I can't promise I'll have spoons but I like emacs ^^
Core idea of emacs -> emacs is a lisp interpreter/compiler with one core datatype: the buffer. Everything is a buffer of text. When you operate on things, yeah you can operate on numbers and symbols and whatnot, but really, the core and primary data type is the buffer. Your files are just buffers of text, you email is a buffer of text, the menu to select things from is a buffer of text, everything is just a buffer of text. That makes it very smooth to hook into. Youre not worrying about an email datatype and a file datatype and a menu datatype, its all just buffers.
Theres tons of resources out there for learning emacs, and while the following graphic is taking the piss a little bit, it gets at the core idea that theres always more to emacs. There's always something to learn, theres always something to implement. Theres a reason its been around for 40 years and hasn't really been superseded by anything. Packages come and go, but the buffer is eternal lol.
Check out system crafter's, he likes emacs and has some good videos. He will be opinionated in a different way than I am, I dont recall his videos but he may tell you to install like spacemacs or doom or smth, dont do it, just go for plain old emacs, and dont be afraid to copypaste code!
Also this video is incredibly hyperbolic but also lowkey accurate at times
As a fellow yapper, thank you, I love this and I have my weekend project all lined up now! I didn't know the history of emacs and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get along with it... I can really appreciate software that has a dead simple core principle which hasn't been surpassed in decades. The stuff I work on is the same in many respects, just a bunch of data stored in multidimensional hierarchical arrays, how you network the arrays and values to each other is where the magic is, and you can build a lot of cool shit on top of that framework. The core tech (MUMPS) is like 60 years old at this point but it hasn't really needed to change. So when you say everything is just a buffer of text, that really speaks to me, that's how I think already!
Hellyeah! I also really appreciate that theres a manual, which isnt always the clearest, but is pretty damn straightforward. Especially since I work with Microsoft stuff, and the documentation there is..... Lacking, to say the least. Even when its present its sometimes just straight up wrong. And Theres so much cool shit out there, people sometimes try to innovate and make something new and just end up making a worse version of it.
I'll check out MUMPS, I'm not familiar with it, but my brain has an aptitude for 3d spatial reasoning and thinking about pointers and multidimensional structures, so it'll probs be cool to me ^^
As an aside, have you seen the mother of all demos? It seems like something you might enjoy. There's aspects of it that are very doable with emacs (especially with org mode!) and its pretty cool to see what was being done 60 years ago, and how we have gotten there and not gotten there in various ways ^^
I feel you!
MUMPS is neat, and the story of how it came to be is pretty interesting too, developed at a Massachusetts hospital by physicians and programmers frustrated with the software they were being made to use. It's all over the healthcare IT world (my field) and I understand some financial institutions run implementations of it too, since it's geared toward high volume DB transactions in a multi-user (hundreds/thousands) environment. But I digress...
I started watching the Mother of all Demos on my lunch break and I was immediately charmed, looking forward to finishing it and getting started myself!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2: