Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Michael Forney]

Hi everyone,

For a while now, I (with help from Mike Kelly and Ingmar Vanhassel) have
been working on an alternative mail client to notmuch.el called ner
(notmuch email reader). ner uses a command specified by the user to edit
and send mail, and uses libnotmuch as opposed to output from the notmuch
command line. ner also has the ability to pipe a message through a
command (like elinks or w3m) to display html messages.

ner is still missing major features like modifying tags (yes, I
know...), saving attachments, gpg, etc, but it is fairly usable to
search through, read, send, and reply to mail.

Currently, at least gcc-4.4, and yaml-cpp-0.2.5 are required.

Anyway, if you are interested, we have a website set up at
http://the-ner.org, and an IRC channel #ner on Freenode, so feel free to
stop by if you want to help or follow ner's progress.

Thanks for reading!

-- 
Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org>

Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Jameson Rollins]

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On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:44:54 -0700, Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org> wrote:
> Currently, at least gcc-4.4, and yaml-cpp-0.2.5 are required.

Does anyone know if there's a Debian package for yaml-cpp-0.2.5?  I see
libyaml-dev, which is at version 0.1.3-1 in unstable, but I don't see
anything that looks like yaml-cpp.

jamie.

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Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Christophe-Marie Duquesne]

This is definetely good news! I am very happy with this frontend and I can at
last use notmuch to read my mail. This makes me wonder if I'll go on
developping my python front-end... Maybe if I have some time. Thank you this!

Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Jameson Rollins]

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On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:44:54 -0700, Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org> wrote:
> Currently, at least gcc-4.4, and yaml-cpp-0.2.5 are required.

Hi, Michael.  What distro do you use?  Do you install yaml-cpp from
source, or does your distro have packages for all the needed libraries?
Unfortunately it looks to me like Debian does not currently support this
package.

jamie.

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Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Michael Forney]

On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:57:43 -0400, Jameson Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:44:54 -0700, Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org> wrote:
> > Currently, at least gcc-4.4, and yaml-cpp-0.2.5 are required.
> 
> Hi, Michael.  What distro do you use?  Do you install yaml-cpp from
> source, or does your distro have packages for all the needed libraries?
> Unfortunately it looks to me like Debian does not currently support this
> package.
> 
> jamie.

I'm using Exherbo (http://exherbo.org), which does have yaml-cpp
packaged (http://git.exherbo.org/summer/packages/dev-libs/yaml-cpp/index.html).

I realize that yaml-cpp might be a bit difficult to come by on many
systems, and I would definitely consider switching to something else in
the future. For now, I needed something easy, and more flexible than
GKeyFile.

-- 
Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org>

Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Carl Worth]

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On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:57:43 -0400, Jameson Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:44:54 -0700, Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org> wrote:
> > Currently, at least gcc-4.4, and yaml-cpp-0.2.5 are required.
> 
> Hi, Michael.  What distro do you use?  Do you install yaml-cpp from
> source, or does your distro have packages for all the needed libraries?
> Unfortunately it looks to me like Debian does not currently support this
> package.

It looks like yaml-cpp is pretty tiny and would be straightforward to
package. I'd be glad to sponsor an upload of that to Debian, (and the
same for ner as well), if anyone would find that useful.

Let me know,

-Carl

-- 
carl.d.worth@intel.com

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Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[David Edmondson]

On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:44:54 -0700, Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org> wrote:
> ner ... uses libnotmuch as opposed to output from the notmuch command
> line.

This means that ner is immune to changes in the output of the notmuch
command, right?

In particular, if we change the JSON output to provide more information
about the MIME structure of a message, ner will not be affected.

Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Michael Forney]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:11:03 +0000, David Edmondson <dme@dme.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:44:54 -0700, Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org> wrote:
> > ner ... uses libnotmuch as opposed to output from the notmuch command
> > line.
> 
> This means that ner is immune to changes in the output of the notmuch
> command, right?
> 
> In particular, if we change the JSON output to provide more information
> about the MIME structure of a message, ner will not be affected.

That is correct, unless of course those changes involve changes to
libnotmuch as well.

-- 
Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org>

Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Carl Worth]

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On Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:44:54 -0700, Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org> wrote:
> Hi everyone,

Hi Michael,

> For a while now, I (with help from Mike Kelly and Ingmar Vanhassel) have
> been working on an alternative mail client to notmuch.el called ner
> (notmuch email reader). ner uses a command specified by the user to edit
> and send mail, and uses libnotmuch as opposed to output from the notmuch
> command line. ner also has the ability to pipe a message through a
> command (like elinks or w3m) to display html messages.

Thanks so much for sharing this! It looks hugely interesting to me. If
nothing else, I'm delighted to have an email client targeting the
notmuch library directly, (rather than running the notmuch binary like
notmuch.el does). This should be a great help to us in ensuring the
library interface does what it should.

Also, lots of people have been interested in a native, curses interface
to notmuch. So I'm delighted to see that become a reality.

> Anyway, if you are interested, we have a website set up at
> http://the-ner.org, and an IRC channel #ner on Freenode, so feel free to
> stop by if you want to help or follow ner's progress.

I'm there now.

And meanwhile, please feel free to use the notmuch mailing list, the
#notmuch IRC channel, and the notmuchmail.org wiki as much as it makes
sense to you. It's already quite plain that the emacs interface occupies
a lot of the traffic at all of those places, so I would be more than
happy to have traffic from alternate notmuch interfaces there as well.

At the very least, I'd like it to be very easy for people visiting
notmuchmail.org to be able to find ner. So I'd be more than happy to
host releases at http://notmuchmail.org/releases/ , etc.

And if there's anything else I can do to support the project, please let
me know.

> Thanks for reading!

And thanks for your contribution.

-Carl

-- 
carl.d.worth@intel.com

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Re: Introducing ner: an ncurses based notmuch ui

[Michael Forney]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:29:34 +0100, Arian Kuschki <arian.kuschki@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Just wanted to say a big thank you for this. I have started using ner and am
> really looking forward to further development. Two small points: I seem to
> have some random cpu and mem usage sometimes when ner is (should be?) idle.
> And second, as you seem to be using yaml for something (for what?), do you
> intend to reuse sup's config file format? That would seem to be beneficial
> both for users as well as for developers. Just my two cents. Thanks again,
> Arian

Thanks for your feedback!

The only thing I can think of about the cpu and memory usage you are
experiencing is that you have a SearchView open that is still collecting
results from your query. When you open a new View, the old ones are
still left in the background, and can be navigated to by pressing ';',
which opens a list of currently open Views. Maybe there needs to be some
way to open a new view, closing the current one, which may be desired
behavior in some cases.

Ner uses yaml for it's configuration (see ner.yaml.sample in the source
directory). I'm not sure it's worth making the configuration files
compatible, because there are several differences between ner and sup
that make some options make sense for one and not the other.

-- 
Michael Forney <mforney@mforney.org>