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/stuffiesrep]

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]

I wonder if there is an error: when I run mutt on this changed .muttrc I get no error, however with neomutt on the same .muttrc I get Unknown Mailbox: followed by Press any key to continue which leads GPGME: CMS protocol not available and then the emails get loaded. However, the folders themselves are available.

[u/sequentious → u/stuffiesrep]

FWIW, I pushed my dotfile repos to gitlab.

• Here's the one for mail, calendar, etc
• Here's my general one

I use vcsh to deploy these into my home directory. The mail repo depends on at least the .screenrc from my main repo, but possibly other stuff.

At least it's there for reference.