I love to use the terminal—I'm a Vim and tmux user—but I was never really able to switch to Mutt. I often receive emails with attached images or HTML code. Maybe some Mutt user can share with me some of the reasons why they like it so much?
First, I use ripmime to dump every single attachment to a folder with dated naming - and so if there is an email in pine with an attachment I want to view, I just web browse a simple apache directory listing and click it. It's not sexy, but it's fast and efficient.
Second, I have a terminal PDF reader installed on my system and defined in alpine as a helper app for pdf files. So I cannot read word or excel right in alpine but I can read PDF docs. So that's nice and slick.
Finally, I never actually click links in alpine, but I defined lynx as a web viewer anyway because that allows me to get the very simple "do you want to view this http link ?" prompt from alpine ... which I always say NO to, but not until I have copied the full URL which they display for me. Then I just open it in a browser.
Fairly happy with this setup.
I find the inability to display HTML emails a feature, not a bug.
No, I don't.
Here's my ~/.mailcap file:
text/html; w3m -T text/html
image/gif; gm display -
image/jpg; gm display -
image/eps; gm display -
application/postscript; gm display -
application/pdf; evince /dev/stdin
> Maybe some Mutt user can share with me some of the reasons why they like it so much?
It lets me fully reside in "the world of text:"
- I can compose emails in my text editor (vim, like you) instead of a crappy textarea.
- Mutt feels much faster than gmail and other gui mail clients. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing.
- I can use tmux's activity monitor feature as a text-based growl notification for new mail.
- All my mail (300k+ messages over 10+ years) is available locally, offline, in Maildirs. It's searchable and pliable by the unix toolset, enabling all kinds of fun things like [1]. I use and recommend offlineimap.
- Control. Mutt has changed conservatively over the years. You can configure it to your liking, and be reasonably certain it will continue working to your liking. No "New Compose" crap here. Tools like mutt are a great long haul investment.
One thing I find seriously lacking with mutt: the folder-centric message index (instead of tag-centric or search-centric index). You can get by okay with mutt's searching and limiting, but if you're jumping between folders often, it kinda sucks. Reminds me, I need to revisit mutt-kz.
It'll force any given file, or stdin, to be interpreted as HTML. It helps to remember that w3m was originally created as a generic file / directory browser. It's Web capabilities were somewhat incidental, though that's what it's largely used for now.
I haven't used it myself, but there's also https://www.neomutt.org/.
text/html; lynx -dump -force_html %s; needsterminal; copiousoutput- Can easily deal with large volumes of email -- quickly tab through unread messages
- Highlights text from previous emails in a thread, making it easy to see who replied to what
- You can also set up highlighting for diffs, making it easy to review attached patches and change snippets
- Powerful search via external indexers (mu, notmuch)
- Keyboard navigation for everything (if you're using vim and tmux, then you're already spending most of your time with your hands on the keyboard, and having to fish for the mouse just to quicky reply to an email starts to feel really slow).
For handling HTML email, I use a two-pronged approach: for most email I use links browser to automatically render HTML as ASCII so I can view it directly in mutt; for email that has images or otherwise cannot be rendered sensibly with links, I have mapped a key to open it in a graphical browser (dwb for fast launching or Firefox+vimperator if I need to deal with login forms, etc).
EDIT: formatting
It would be cool if Mutt could be configured to support that, maybe through the w3mimgdisplay command. I think that's how [ranger file browser](https://github.com/ranger/ranger) does it.