In this case it was to figure out in what config file a "tls on" was missing, after first working out that was indeed the reason NeoMutt wouldn't send. :)
@mathias So what makes NeoMutt so much better than Mutt?
(guy living in mutt+vim since 20 years and too lazy to change his habits, but occasionally contemplating that the grass might be greener elsewhere)
I honestly have no real idea, I only know the theory behind it: NeoMutt is more rapidly and consistently developed. All their changes are suggested upstream and in many cases included in to Mutt. NeoMutt is like a stable development branch of Mutt you might say, even though that might sound like an oxymoron, hehe.
For me, not being a well-versed user of either, and installing from afresh, it made most sense to install NeoMutt.
@mathias Well, if you’ll get frustrated with config and feel a need for a potential acceleration in finding a solution, drop me a line. Maybe I’ll be able to help, even though my mutt setup is very stable in a particular spot since many years, so I probably don’t know about all the fancy edge features.
If you have other tips on good cli tools I'm all ears btw. I'm setting up my linux box to manage most of my tasks in cli. So far I have khal (calendar), neomutt (mail), nb (notes/knowledge base/bookmarks) etc but there might be things I've missed as I haven't explored these things much over the last 10 years.
@mathias re other cli tools: I’d say: don’t push it too much. After two decades of living in and playing with these setups, my personal conclusion is that some things are simply better in windows-like UI, so I invest in integration of CLI/terminal tools (mutt, vim, etc.) with desktop apps, rather than pushing the cli experience to useless places. What I care a lot for, though, is that my storage formats are portable (maildirs instead of mailbox, markdown instead of anything else, WebDAV/CalDAV etc. for sync, rather than proprietary stuff, etc.)
But to answer the question:
- neomutt gives you mailbox search capabilities. For that I use old
mairix(+cronindexing every night), not perfect but still works for me - for todo lists and tasks management from CLI, you might want to check taskwarrior, but I personally go Seamonkey+Lightning way
- for passwords management you can go
pass - well, and of course if you are not a vim person (like I am),
orgmodeis the swiss knife for anything you might ever need for your notes, todolists, etc. After all that emacs thingy is an operating system of its own anyway. Or so I’ve heard :-).
Either way, I derive the most value from deep reading of ssh and gnupg manuals. There’s HUGE amount of stuff possible when you look into seamless integration of tools at remote vs. local.
@mathias Oh, I forgot, in the taskwarrior ecosystem, I found vit a very exciting project. I later abandoned it, but it’s good and promising.
Cool, thanks! I shall look in to all of that! :)
But yes, I know what you are saying. In all actuality I use "all" the platforms. At work, which is very locked down for security reasons, I'm on Windows. I'm typing this on my 5k Retina iMac and when I'm talking about cli tools for Linux (Manjaro in my case) that is my second machine next to this one, which mostly handles everything in my home when it comes to media serving etc. I wouldn't dream of doing photo/video/design editing on the linux box; that is WHY I have the iMac in the first place. :)
However, I do like challenges, and I am aiming to get to my old dream machine I used to have at work, but in a smaller version, which is basically a minimal (Manjaro) Linux install, based on XFCE but using Xmonad for windowhandling. That means I can run "regular" desktop apps, should I choose to. But it looks so much cooler with an all-out cli view. Also, it fills my need for tinkering and problem solving that is "outside" of my regular problem solving (work/family related etc).
There is also a privacy/security reason behind my tinkering, and like you say, I have started falling back more and more to "the basics". Getting fed up with "productivity tools" and their flaky-at-best or privacy-intruding synchronization between platforms, started falling back more and more to things like "why don't I just use git?" and "hey, I can actually store both Notes and Todo/Reminders on my IMAP account, and they get picked up by my iOS devices as well as my wifes Android!".
I have been looking at Taskwarrior and have yet to decide if I should go down that route (as it doesn't strike me as cross-platform portable) or if I should go down Todoman (which saves todo's in ical format) etc.
@mathias @FailForward
This thread is pure gold for looking into cli software :D
Do you people use cli most of the time our of principle or is it a habit? I found myself using a lot of vim and terminal-based tools for personal stuff, but uni and other places still require word documents and stuff :(
Do you people use cli most of the time our of principle or is it a habit?
Neither.
Ideologies are bad for your health
– me, right now
For me it’s an emergent phenomenon. Retrospectively, I think I was always optimizing for the speed of my usage of computers. In effect, I want my UX be about as fast (not necessarily faster - for instance I am not a touch typist) as my mind goes. Second force in my relevant fragment of life is that I am a lazy bastard, so I want to automate repetitive boring crap. The consequence of these two forces was that over time I gravitated towards using keyboard as the primary peripheral device with mouse only the second. And once you get to that place, terminal and things like vim or mutt start to make much more sense than other things. I can respond to an e-mail and have it GPG signed with Yubikey faster than many even load Thunderbird, or whatever Gmail tab you have. I care for that. It pays of to shave off 10 seconds off of a activity you do 100x a day.
But as I said above, oftentimes I then discovered that going pure terminal has problems: either crappy UX of those apps, or missing features (for instance now I am typing this into the tiny text box on Qoto Mastodon, rather then toot gui, because toot turns out to miss too many things - funny enough, among others, comfortable keyboard UX despite it being TUI app). And when I discover that, I then typically look for a desktop version of what I need. Primary concern is that I can either natively handle it with keyboard, or can force it to be like that (shortcuts, macros, etc.). But some things just don’t submit to this. I am an avid Firefox user rather whatever vimperator stuff).
P.S. Did you know you can handle Mastodon UI (at least on Qoto) largely by keyboard? Check the “Hotkeys” link in the left sidebar.
@FailForward @mathias
I use mastodon on my phone
to reply most of the time and on PC I type new stuff every morning, there really aren’t any hotkeys I could use. But yeah, good to know.
