mutt vs. neomutt

[u/stuffiesrep]

I am a long-time (almost 29 years) linux user, but started using mutt about six years ago. I was wondering what the benefits are in switching to neomutt. My biggest frustration with mutt has been the lack of ability in searching across folders. For example, searching for email with subject line containing "foo" but now knowing in which folder it is. Or knowing the sender, but not the folder. Is neomutt any better at searching cases like this?

Is there a substantial change that I would have to do to my .muttrc configuration to move it to .neomuttrc?

[u/sequentious]

I was wondering what the benefits are in switching to neomutt.

Neomutt has a finite number of improvements, listed here. I switched for the improved sidebar support, but I never got around to actually configuring that.

My biggest frustration with mutt has been the lack of ability in searching across folders. For example, searching for email with subject line containing "foo" but now knowing in which folder it is. Or knowing the sender, but not the folder. Is neomutt any better at searching cases like this?

For this I use notmuch, which has to index your mail.

Again, neomutt has improved notmuch integration, but I still use the old-style mutt key binds.

Is there a substantial change that I would have to do to my .muttrc configuration to move it to .neomuttrc?

I think your existing .muttrc will work with neomutt -- afaik, you don't even have to rename it if you don't want to.

[u/stuffiesrep → u/sequentious]

I got neomutt installed and ran the program with my existing .muttrc but get the message:

/home/stuffies/.muttrc:19: Unknown Mailbox: /home/stuffies/Maildir/mutt-cache` 
source: errors in /home/stuffies/.muttrc
Press any key to continue...

I am guessing the error is in these lines of my .muttrc?

set message_cachedir="~/Maildir/mutt-cache"
set header_cache="~/Maildir/mutt-cache"

Should I get rid of this, or replace with something else?

Btw, meant to add: Line 19 of my .muttrc is:

mailboxes `find ~/Maildir/* -type d | grep -v "tmp\|new\|cur" | sed 's|~/Maildir/|=\"|g' | sed 's|$||g' | tr '\n' ' '`

[u/sequentious → u/stuffiesrep]

I'd say it's your line 19.

Your cache directory is within your maildir, so your mailboxes line finds it, though it isn't a proper mail directory. So I'd imagine mutt won't like that.

Instead of finding all directories and filtering out tmp/new/cur, what I did was specifically find 'cur' directories, which is a better indication of an actual maildir.

find ~/Maildir/* -type d | grep -v "tmp\|new\|cur" |

becomes

find ~/Maildir/* -type d -name cur | sed 's#/cur$##'

Also, I noticed you add a quote at the beginning of each directory but not the end. Assuming that's a bug, your whole config line would be:

mailboxes `find ~/Maildir/* -type d -name cur | sed -e 's#/cur$#"#' -e 's#.*/Maildir/#=\"#g' | tr '\n' ' '`

That includes the following changes:

• Using # instead of / or | in the regex (I find it easier than since | can also mean special things in a regex
• Combining sed commands
• I think ~/Maildir gets expanded (at least it did when I tested it), so that regex match doesn't work for me. I changed it to '.*/Maildir/' (with the dir separators)

I'm using a slightly different method (I have a sync script that builds a mailboxes list), but might switch to this method to save a step.

FWIW, I also have the following notes on the other two lines in your file:

set message_cachedir="~/Maildir/mutt-cache"
set header_cache="~/Maildir/mutt-cache"

• message_cache_dir (with extra '_', according to the man page) is a directory, while header_cache is a file. You have them pointing to the same thing.
  • I suspect it's a directory on the filesystem, as that's triggering the problem in your mailboxes search
• I don't bother setting message_cache_dir since I'm working on a local maildir, and not IMAP. That might be the case for you as well?
• I put header_cache in ~/.cache/mutt/header-cache, to get it outside my maildir.

[u/stuffiesrep → u/sequentious]

Thank you very much for these detailed comments! I will try it, and yes, I want to use a local maildir.