barely

Barely

Barely is a console notmuch frontend heavily inspired by alot, which is awesome, but slow. Therefore it tries to be fast and simple while staying very customizable.

Features

Features include

• simplistic buffer interface
• searching for messages and threads.
• reading, replying and composing new messages
• sending and receiving attachments
• multiple accounts
• simple tab completion in the prompt

Things that are left to do

• encryption/signing support
• making the : prompt a bit friendlier (history)

Installation

Barely is written in Go. To install it, get a working Go environment and type

go get github.com/laochailan/barely

If you don’t want Go to install stuff locally to your user directory, package it properly for your distribution.

Configuration

Barely looks for its config file in ~/.config/barely/config. To get an example file which contains all the standard settings run

barely -config

It is necessary to configure accounts in order to send mail.

Usage

Barelys interface is arranged in buffers. A buffer is a view that can contain search results or the content of a message for example. In the bottom left you can see what buffer you are in and how many buffers are open.

If you start notmuch, most of the time you will see a search buffer for unread messages.

Unlike most MUAs Barely does not have mail directories but relies solely on searches to organize your mail. This approach is much more flexible than directories, especially when you have more than one mail account.

To do a search type /, a notmuch search term and then enter. Alternatively, you can type :search yoursearchterm. To search for single messages instead of threads type :msearch searchterm.

It is recommended to define keybindings for your favorite searches. I bind the number keys to searches for my mail accounts for example.

[bindings]
key = 1 search to:account1@domain.com
key = 2 search to:account2@domain.com
key = 3 search to:account3@domain.com
key = 4 search to:account4@domain.com
key = 5 search to:account5@domain.com

Inside Barely you can always press the ? key to get a list of possible key bindings in that context.

For a full list, read the example config file.

If you are not familiar with notmuch, you might want read about its tagging abilities to get the most out of Barely. I currently use

• offlineimap — to download my mail
• notmuch — to index it
• barely — to read it and compose new messages
• msmtp — as sendmail command for barely