2012-02-01

update

Regular emacs-fu programming will resume shortly, but for now I'll provide a brief update on some of my projects.

  • Recently, I discussed sauron, and event-tracking tool for emacs. I added some new features, fixed some bugs, and got some contributions (yay!)
    • tweak/improve priority handling
    • add a backend for the emacs-24 notification system
    • add settings to make the sauron frame 'sticky', and to hide the mode-line
    • enable dbus-message source outside your session; useful for cron/procmail etc.
    • display events in a tabular fashion
    • add support for John Wiegley's event.el
    • much improved documentation
    • other things…

    Sauron version 0.2 is available through Marmalade (see Package Management Revisited)

  • I released version 0.9.8 of mu (e-mail searcher/indexer, previously discussed in Searching e-mails with Wanderlust and mu). Now, for emacs-users I've added mu4e (manual), a new & experimental e-mail client. It won't be big and professional like gnus, but it's fun to hack on, and I've been using it for a few months.

14 comments:

boots` said...

The linux homage magically forces me to try mu4e.

Unknown said...

hi, thank you so much for the so many emacs tips here.
Sauron is a great tool for me! I have been searching such a tool for so long.

I wonder that sauron can support howm(http://howm.sourceforge.jp/).

I use howm to manager my schedules. it is very powerful and awesome tool for arranging todo list, appointment and take notes.
if sauron could support howm, it would be so perfect for me.

Thank you!

djcb said...

@Unknown: I'm sure howm could be supported somehow, but would require a bit of help from someone familiar with its internals...

Unknown said...

@djcb: thank you for the reply. Hope there is anything I can help. I have some connections to the author of howm.el. I would be very very much appreciate if you are considering to make sauron support howm.

Fabrice said...

Hi Dirk-Jan,

Thanks a lot for this blog, this has been a source of inspiration ever since I found it.

I'm considering switching from thunderbird to emacs based mail reading. Following your lead, I tried Wanderlust, but it didn't manage to index/import my large maildir inbox (~9500 emails).

I need to spend some time trying to understand where the problem come from, but in the meantime I was wondering if you could comment on the indexing capabilities of mu and mu4e in this context. On mu's page, you write that indexing is fast. What would then be a large maildir for mu? I've roughly 9 Go of emails, with an inbox around 9500 emails and other boxes totaling roughly 120000 emails. Is that big with respect to mu?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Fabrice

djcb said...

@Fabrice: that should not be any problem; I know people are happily using mu with quite a bit more mail than that. After the initial indexing (which takes a few minutes) it should be very quick.

WL (and e.g.gnus) take a lot of time to build a cache of the message headers (all in elisp); in case of mu this is all done in C/C++ code, and can also be done in the background.

Anyway, just give it a try :) and please let me know how well it works for you.

Fabrice said...

@djcb: I've just tested mu (mu-0.9.8), this works perfectly! First indexing took 9 minutes for roughly 135 000 emails (on a xeon W3670 with plenty of everything). Search is instantaneous (browsing also in mu4e). I still need to adjust everything to have a complete configuration for mu4e, but so far this looks brilliant! I've browse very quickly the documentation, so I might have missed it, but is there a way to mark an email as unread?

djcb said...

@Fabrice: ah, that's nice to hear. mu4e is rather new, so I'm sure there are many features not implemented yet (esp. when I don't use them myself).

mark-as-read/mark-as-unread *was* one of those unimplemented features, but I've added those now in 'master' -- see https://github.com/djcb/mu.

Probably in the next few weeks I'll do another release with a few of such updates.

Unknown said...

Hi, I find mu4e is a great email client. I am considering to change my default email client from wanderlust to mu4e. However, there is one thing that prevent me from switching to mu4a, that is, I find mu4a can only display email written in utf-8.
I usually receive emails with various encodings, such as shift_jis(Japanese), gb2312(Chinese) and some others. Could you please give me some advice on how to make mu4e display different encoding text other than utf8 automatically just like wanderlust does.

Thank you in advance.

Unknown said...

I find a problem of mu. Just like mu4e can't correctly display email with encodings that are not utf-8, mu seems only index email of utf8.

Is it possible to make both mu and mu4e work for emails with different encodings than utf8?

I think it would be of great important to guys like me who are always working on emails written with various encodings.

Thank you!

djcb said...

@Unknown: what version are you using? Current versions (>= 0.9.8.4) should be fine, or there is some bug. If you can reproduce it with the current version, please send me the raw message file where you see this problem, and I'll check.

Unknown said...

Thank you very much for the quick response.
my mu is 0.9.8.4, installed by apt-get under debian sid.

I will find a message that mu failed to index.

myles said...

Hi. Today I switched to mu4e from gnus which broke after an upgrade; I like it a lot already, so Thanks! Is it possible to copy a message to a sent folder depending on the 'From:' field? I ask this because I have three email accounts.
Thanks.

djcb said...

@myles: not automatically unless you write a bit of elisp... you could however move the sent messages to the appropriate folder with something like this (untested, ymmv etc., but a start at least):

$ for each m in `mu find maildir:/sent from:my-other-from@example.com --fields=l`; mv $m /path/to/other/sent-folder; done