bower

Bower is a curses frontend for the Notmuch email system. I wrote it for me, but you might like it, too.

bower is written in Mercury.

See some screen shots.

Requirements

bower makes use of standard Linux utilities, so will likely require some work to work on other systems.

At compile time:

• Mercury compiler (20.06 or later, including release-of-the-day); currently available at http://dl.mercurylang.org/index.html
• ncurses with wide character support
• gpgme (GnuPG Made Easy)

At run time:

• notmuch
• GNU coreutils: base64
• SMTP client to send messages (configurable)
• file(1) to detect MIME types when adding attachments

To create a man page from this readme, you will need:

• pandoc universal document converter
• awk

Compiling

Firstly, to install Mercury from source you can follow these steps:

tar xf mercury-srcdist-VERSION.tar.gz
cd mercury-srcdist-VERSION
./configure --prefix=/path/to/mercury
make install PARALLEL=-j6 LIBGRADES=
export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/mercury/bin

where PARALLEL=-j6 reflects the number of parallel jobs to use.

With Mercury installed and mmc in your PATH, run:

make

On Gentoo, and perhaps some other Linux distributions, run:

make WITH_NCURSESW_DIR=1

You may want to edit src/Mercury.options to suit your system. On success, the build will produce a named bower.

To generate a man page, run:

make man

This will produce bower.1 for installation into your man search path.

Packages are also available in Alpine Linux, AUR, Gentoo, GuixRUS, and Nixpkgs.

Configuration

You can configure bower by creating a file in one of the following locations, in order of priority:

• the path specified in the environment variable BOWER_CONFIG (if set)

• the path $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bower/bower.conf (if the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set and non-empty)

• the path $HOME/.config/bower/bower.conf (if the environment variable HOME is set)

• a path $basedir/bower/bower.conf where $basedir is an element of the colon-separated list given in the environment variable XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (defaults to /etc/xdg)

The details of the configuration file are given in bower.conf.sample.

Bower is designed such that it can be run on the local machine but call out to notmuch on a remote machine (that holds your mail) via ssh. The advantage is that you can start helper programs on the local machine (e.g. a web browser or image viewer), and add or save attachments on the local filesystem, even if your mail archive is stored on a different machine.

Bower also keeps some centralised information in the notmuch configuration file. You may wish to tell bower about your Maildir hierarchy, namely where to place draft and sent messages. The defaults are given here:

[bower:maildir]
drafts_folder = Drafts
sent_folder = Sent

It is recommended that your .notmuch-config file contains at least these search exclusions:

[search]
exclude_tags=deleted;draft

Usage

bower [OPTION]... [SEARCH-TERM]...
bower [OPTION]... mailto:MAILTO

Run bower to start, optionally passing a list of initial search terms. If no search terms are provided, bower will use the search string ~default, where ~default is a search term alias (see below). By default, ~default is equivalent to searching for messages from the last week but you are free to change it.

Running bower with a single mailto: argument will go directly to the compose screen.

The only options supported so far are -h, --help and --version.

Views

There are two main views: the index, and the combined thread/pager.

Index view keys

This view shows the notmuch search results for the current query. The keys are:

j, k            next, previous thread
g, G            first, last thread
[, ]            scroll half page up, down
Tab, comma      go to next unread thread
Enter           open thread
Alt+Enter       open thread in obscured mode
l, ~            change search terms ("limit")
Alt+Key         invoke search term alias named by Key
=               refresh search results
z               toggle authors column

/, ?            search for string within results
n               skip to next search result
N               skip to next search result in opposite direction

U               toggle 'unread' tag on current thread
F               toggle 'flagged' tag on current thread
a               toggle 'inbox', 'unread' tags on current thread (archive)
d               set 'deleted' tag on current thread
u               unset 'deleted' tag on current thread
$               apply '+spam -unread' tags on current thread
+, -            add/remove arbitrary tags
t               select/unselect thread
Ctrl+A          select all threads
T               unselect all threads
'               bulk tag changes on selected threads
"               same as ' but retain selections afterwards

m               compose new message
r               reply to sender
e               reply to everyone
L               reply to list
R               recall postponed message
@               add to address book

|               pipe thread IDs to command

q               quit

Pressing Alt+Key will treat Key as a single character search alias that is invoked directly without further prompting (see below for search term aliases). This provides a convenient way to switch between frequent queries.

Thread/pager view keys

This view pages through an entire thread. The keys are:

j, k            next, previous message
g, G            first, last message
b, space        previous, next page
\, Enter        previous, next line
[, ]            previous, next half page
Tab, comma      go to next unread message
p               go to parent message
S               skip quoted text
O               toggle ordering of messages (threaded or flat)
M               toggle obscuring of unmatched messages
=               refresh search results

/, ?            search for string
n               skip to next search result
N               skip to next search result in opposite direction

J               mark current message read and go to next message
K               mark current message read and go to previous message
U               toggle 'unread' tag on current message
^R              remove 'unread' tag on preceding messages
F               toggle 'flagged' tag on current message
a               toggle 'inbox', 'unread' tags on current message (archive)
d               add 'deleted' tag on current message
u               remove 'deleted' tag on current message
$               apply '+spam -unread' tags on current message
+, -            add/remove arbitrary tags
t               select/unselect message
Ctrl+A          select all messages
T               unselect all messages
'               bulk tag changes on selected threads
"               same as ' but retain selections afterwards

r               reply to sender
e               reply to everyone
L               reply to list
W               forward message
B               resend message to another address ("bounce")
E               use current message as a template for a new message
R               recall postponed message
@               add to address book

v               highlight next visible attachment or URL or folded text
V               highlight next visible attachment or top of message
s, w            save highlighted message/part to file
o               open highlighted message/part/URL with external program
z               cycle alternative parts / toggle inline display / decrypt
Z               toggle inline display of part / decrypt
z, Z            expand/collapse folded text
y               verify signed part

|               pipe thread or message IDs to command

i, q            return to index
I               return to index, removing 'unread' tag on all messages
A               return to index, removing 'inbox' and 'unread' on messages

The 'o' command, which opens parts and URLs, takes a command using Unix shell quoting syntax. If the command ends with an unquoted '&' character then the command will be run in the background.

Note: forward (W) and edit-as-new (E) currently will not create a proper message template for messages that are manually decrypted in the thread view. A workaround is to set crypto.decrypt_by_default = true in the bower configuration so that encrypted messages are automatically decrypted upon opening a thread.

In "obscured" mode, messages unmatched by the search query in the index view will be displayed in a different colour, and ignored by navigation keys (e.g. j, k, and string search). The mode can be toggled with the 'M' key.

Limit command syntax extensions

The l (limit) command in the index view slightly extends the notmuch search term syntax with these macros:

~A              disable default cap on number of search results
~F              tag:flagged
~U              tag:unread
~D              tag:deleted
~d DATE..DATE
~d DATE..
~d ..DATE
~d DATE

By default, the number of threads displayed i