Refining My NeoMutt Configuration

Written By: Jake Bauer | Posted: 2020-05-05 | Last Updated: 2020-05-05

I use NeoMutt as my email client. It’s fast, treats text/plain email as a first-class citizen, and is terminal based so I can use it with vim keybindings. The configuration, though, is really complex and there’s a lot that can be played with. Over the past few days, I’ve been tinkering and tweaking with it to make my email experience on the command line just a little bit better.

One thing that I found annoying were text/html emails which relied so much on image content they had to be viewed in their HTML form. I used to save the body of these emails and then open them up in Firefox, but just by adding

text/html; $BROWSER %s;

to my mailcap file, I am able to open these bodies in Firefox from within NeoMutt.

Another thing I found cumbersome was the handling of contacts through an aliases file. Instead, I opted to install and use abook which is a contact program, used on the command line, designed for use with mutt. This should make storing and referring to my contacts easier than it used to be. The options that I used in my neomuttrc are:

set query_command="abook --mutt-query '%s'"
macro index,pager a \
    "<pipe-message>abook --add-email-quiet<return>" \
    "Add this sender to abook"
bind editor <Tab> complete-query

Some other minor changes include:

Moving the colour configuration into its own file so that the main neomuttrc file is less cluttered.
Changing the date format to the ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD with time now in the 24h clock.
Cleaning up unused keybindings
Moving my signature from my ~/docs folder into ~/.config/neomutt so that it can be tracked with git.

You can view my dotfiles on sourcehut or mirrored on git.paritybit.ca. Don’t hesitate to share suggestions or comments!

This is my eleventh post for the #100DaysToOffload challenge. You can learn more about this challenge over at https://100daystooffload.com.