Yay. I managed to send an email. All by myself. Sometimes it is the little things that make you happy. :)

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)

@FailForward

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.

@FailForward the one thing I shall be looking for after my next meeting will be how to strip, or turn off, html in received e-mails to increase readability. It is probably in there, but pressing "?" gives me reading for days, hehe.

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 (+cron indexing 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), orgmode is 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.

@FailForward

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 :(

@academicalnerd @FailForward

For me it is a mixture of reasons, where I think the main one is that I create distractions/challenges unrelated to anything else, in combination with keeping it "pure" and to "the core" of things. I can't even call it a habit these days, though I used to be quite hardcore at it, as I haven't used it much during the last 10 years, but am now getting back to it.

Having said that I love the look of nice cli software, especially when there is a lot of it on screen(s) at the same time. As close as I get to feel like a "hacker" in the eyes of "normal people" I guess, haha.

I just realised that you guys are on Mastodon so I'll keep the formatting simple (I had this written down with Markdown links and all, but I know that doesn't render well on Mastodon), but these are some of the software mentioned in this and another thread I have, so might as well summarise it here too:

Mail - NeoMutt with isync/mbsync
Calendar - khal with vdirsyncer
Todo - Taskwarrior or Todoman
Notes - nb
Bookmarks - nb
Knowledge base - nb
Editor - vim + addons
Terminal - Terminator or tmux and/or byobu
Shell - zsh
Shell add-on - Starship
File manager - Midnight Commander / ranger / nnn
Music player - ncmpc
Spotify client - ncspot
Disk usage - ncdu
Package manager - Homebrew
Torrent - RTorrent

I haven't gotten to add various chat/communication software to that list. I used to run all the "messengers" (MSN/ICQ/FB and of course IRC) in cli, but I haven't even started my refresh on those areas just yet, and now it would be more like Signal/XMPP/Matrix etc I guess.

@mathias @FailForward

Thanks for the list! I use some of these, although for knowledgebase and notes I find obsidian quite good. Not cli, but it runs smoothly and available on windows. And alacritty as a terminal is surprisingly good, tbh.

As for package manager - stock apt from my ubuntu-based pop-os is just good enough :p