nm

https://github.com/tjim/nevermore.git

git clone 'git://github.com/tjim/nevermore.git'
17

N E V E R M O R E

Nevermore is an experimental emacs email interface for Notmuch. It provides:

Installation

Nevermore is based on Notmuch, so you'll need to install Notmuch (including emacs support), and run it once from the command line to configure it.

You'll also need the peg package.

Then drop the source files (nm.el, nm-dateparse.el, and nm-company.el) into your load-path and place this in your .emacs or init.el file:

(require 'nm)

Mail address completion

Nevermore uses company-mode for mail address completion. After installing company-mode, add

(require 'nm-company)

to your init file. Nevermore will automatically derive completion candidates from your mail store, and display them as you type in a To:, Cc:, or Bcc: field. Note that company-mode has a setting,

company-minimum-prefix-length

that controls the number of characters you must type before autocompletion will take effect, and it defaults to three (3) characters. You may set this as low as 1 character.

Junk mail filtering

Nevermore uses bogofilter for junk mail filtering. It works out of the box as long as you have bogofilter installed. Type J to mark a thread or message as junk.

Usage

Start reading mail with

M-x nm

This will bring up a summary window with the results of the default search, which is tag:inbox. Nevermore can search for threads or individual messages; by default it searches for individual messages. You can toggle between thread search and message search by hitting M.

You can navigate in the search results with the usual emacs commands (C-n, C-p, C-v, C->, etc.) You can also type n to move to the next result or p to move to the previous result.

To view a message or thread, hit SPC or RET. In message search mode, the message will appear in a window below the search results. Hit SPC to read more of the message, DEL to back up. Hit C-x 1 to get rid of the message window.

In thread search mode, SPC or RET will replace the search results buffer with a buffer showing the selected thread. You can use the usual keys from notmuch to navigate the thread. Hit q to exit the thread and return to the results buffer.

Searching

To start a new search, hit /. This will bring the current search to the minibuffer, where you can edit it. As you change the search, the results buffer is updated in real time. When you are satisfied with the query, hit RET to get back into the results buffer.

The Notmuch query syntax is documented here.

In the minibuffer you can navigate your search history with M-p and M-n.

Focusing on a thread

In message search mode, there is a separate result for each message in a thread. Sometimes it's useful to see all of the messages of a thread, while excluding messages from other threads; hit T to change your search query to one that shows just those messages.

Search quirks

Nevermore's underlying query engine is Xapian. Xapian's behaviour during incremental search can take a little getting used to. Xapian uses stemming so that the queries

look

and

looking

are really the same query; they search for variants of look (look, looked, looking, etc.) . However,

looki

is a different query that probably has no results, since it is not an English word. Therefore, if you search incrementally for “looking”, when you have typed just “look” you will get the full result set, but when you go on and add an “i”, you'll get an empty result set. Eventually you will hit “looking” and you'll see the full result set again.

You can use a wildcard character to avoid this behaviour:

looki*

will search for “looki” and any extension of “looki”. One way to use this is to start a query ending in “*”, then back up a character (C-b) and continue typing your query. Note that

looking*

can have fewer results than

looking

because the later query uses stemming but the former does not.

Sending mail

Hit m to send a new message. In message search mode you can hit r to reply, R to reply-all, and f to forward a message. Nevermore currently does not have a notion of the “current” message of thread, so these commands don't make sense in thread search mode. However, if you are viewing a thread, r and R work just as in notmuch.el.

Archiving

Hit a to archive a result, which simply moves it out of tag:inbox.

Deleting

Hit d to delete a result, which simply moves it out of tag:inbox and into tag:deleted.

Tags

Tags are displayed at the right of every result. You can edit the tags in the minibuffer by hitting t. You can autocomplete tags in the minibuffer with TAB.

Snooze

Nevermore has rudimentary support for snoozing messages and threads. In the results buffer hit s to snooze a result. The result will be moved out of tag:inbox into tag:later. Note that if you are searching on tag:inbox, the result will not immediately disappear from your search results; you need to re-run the search, which can be done by hitting g.

A snoozed result will be moved back to tag:inbox the following morning. You can change the default snooze target by changing nm-snooze-default-target (it starts out as tomorrow 6am). If you supply a prefix argument to the snooze command (C-u s), nevermore will prompt you for a target.

Jotmuch

Nevermore supports searching for web page archives maintained in jotmuch. Invoke nevermore with

M-x nm-jotmuch

to search your jotmuch database. Hitting RET on a result will open the original web page in your browser.