Using sup-mail

Some time ago I wanted some features that evolution wouldn’t give to me, such as a good user experience without using the mouse, and the possibility to use an external editor for writing e-mails.  I always liked gmail web interface, but I don’t like using software that I can’t change or see the code, so I wanted threaded view, but I was not with a very high expectative of finding it, since I’ve never seen it anywhere else.  I tried icedove, sylpheed, claws and mutt, but none of them was good enough for me.  I couldn’t use very well icedove, sylpheed and claws only with the keyboard, and mutt wouldn’t show me a list of folders with how many unread messages there was in each of them.  mutt-patched tries to do this, but the number of messages aren’t updated automatically.  So I kept with evolution.

At that time, I even tried evolution from experimental, which contained a plugin to use an external editor.  The result was that I got even more crashes, and the external editor was not very nice.  I gave up about it when I had to remove totem because of broken dependencies with the evolution from experimental.

Some days ago Rafael (Preá) Cunha de Almeida told me that he heard of this sup, and tried using it, but didn’t like very much, because it was not good for accessing the mail from two different machines.  As I use only my notebook most of the time, I decided to try it out.  And i’m liking it: it’s mostly like gmail, but with a very good feature I don’t remember seeing in gmail: you can kill a thread, and even if more mail arrives from that thread, it’ll not be shown in your inbox.  Other thing I liked about it is that it’s highly customizable in Ruby, which made me feel a little bit like in XMonad.

The first problem I found on it was the handling of UTF-8.  I found this bug about it, and installed the recommended package, so it worked.  I hope this correction, or the better one suggested here, get to Debian.

I took a look at the Hooks page on the sup wiki, and used the fetchmail suggestion.  I noticed that the code that was there in the time didn’t worked here (maybe a bashism?):


fetchmail >& /dev/null


So I replaced it in the wiki with:


fetchmail 2>&1 > /dev/null


which worked here.

I wanted to create a new binding, to kill the thread, kill the buffer, and move to the next message in thread-view-mode, so I tried some possibilities without success, until I got to this, with the help of hyperbolis@#sup@irc.freenode.net:


class Redwood::ThreadViewMode
@@keymaps[self].add :kill_and_next,
"Kill this thread, kill buffer, and view next", '&'
def kill_and_next; kill_and_then :next end
def kill_and_then op
dispatch op do
multi_kill [@thread]
end
end

# From lib/modes/thread-index-mode.rb
## m-m-m-m-MULTI-KILL
def multi_kill threads
UndoManager.register “killing #{threads.size.pluralize ‘thread’}” do
threads.each do |t|
t.remove_label :killed
add_or_unhide t.first
Index.save_thread t
end
regen_text
end

threads.each do |t|
t.apply_label :killed
# hide_thread t
end

regen_text
BufferManager.flash “#{threads.size.pluralize ‘thread’} killed.”
threads.each { |t| Index.save_thread t }
end
end

This is the content of the file ~/.sup/hooks/startup.rb. I copied a function from the source code of sup, commenting one line that was relative to that context.