Nevermore is an experimental emacs email interface for Notmuch. It provides:
- Interactive search
- Snooze
- Tag editing with autocompletion
- Mail address completion (via company-mode)
- Junk mail filtering (via bogofilter)
Nevermore is based on Notmuch, so you'll need to install Notmuch (including emacs support), and run it once from the command line to configure it.
You'll also need the peg package.
Then drop the source files (nm.el, nm-dateparse.el, and nm-company.el) into your load-path and place this in your .emacs or init.el file:
(require 'nm)
Nevermore uses company-mode for mail address completion. After installing company-mode, add
(require 'nm-company)
to your init file. Nevermore will automatically derive completion candidates from your mail store, and display them as you type in a To:, Cc:, or Bcc: field. Note that company-mode has a setting,
company-minimum-prefix-length
that controls the number of characters you must type before autocompletion will take effect, and it defaults to three (3) characters. You may set this as low as 1 character.
Nevermore uses bogofilter for junk mail filtering. It works out of
the box as long as you have bogofilter installed. Type J to mark a
thread or message as junk.
Start reading mail with
M-x nm
This will bring up a summary window with the results of the default
search, which is tag:inbox. Nevermore can search for threads or
individual messages; by default it searches for individual messages.
You can toggle between thread search and message search by hitting
M.
You can navigate in the search results with the usual emacs commands
(C-n, C-p, C-v, C->, etc.) You can also type n to move to
the next result or p to move to the previous result.
To view a message or thread, hit SPC or RET. In message search
mode, the message will appear in a window below the search results.
Hit SPC to read more of the message, DEL to back up. Hit C-x 1
to get rid of the message window.
In thread search mode, SPC or RET will replace the search results
buffer with a buffer showing the selected thread. You can use the
usual keys from notmuch to navigate the thread. Hit q to exit the
thread and return to the results buffer.
To start a new search, hit /. This will bring the current search to
the minibuffer, where you can edit it. As you change the search, the
results buffer is updated in real time. When you are satisfied with
the query, hit RET to get back into the results buffer.
The Notmuch query syntax is documented here.
In the minibuffer you can navigate your search history with M-p and
M-n.
In message search mode, there is a separate result for each message in
a thread. Sometimes it's useful to see all of the messages of a
thread, while excluding messages from other threads; hit T to change
your search query to one that shows just those messages.
Nevermore's underlying query engine is Xapian. Xapian's behaviour during incremental search can take a little getting used to. Xapian uses stemming so that the queries
look
and
looking
are really the same query; they search for variants of look (look, looked, looking, etc.) . However,
looki
is a different query that probably has no results, since it is not an English word. Therefore, if you search incrementally for "looking", when you have typed just "look" you will get the full result set, but when you go on and add an "i", you'll get an empty result set. Eventually you will hit "looking" and you'll see the full result set again.
You can use a wildcard character to avoid this behaviour:
looki*
will search for "looki" and any extension of "looki". One way to use
this is to start a query ending in "*", then back up a character
(C-b) and continue typing your query. Note that
looking*
can have fewer results than
looking
because the later query uses stemming but the former does not.
Hit m to send a new message. In message search mode you can hit r
to reply, R to reply-all, and f to forward a message. Nevermore
currently does not have a notion of the "current" message of thread,
so these commands don't make sense in thread search mode. However, if
you are viewing a thread, r and R work just as in notmuch.el.
Hit a to archive a result, which simply moves it out of tag:inbox.
Hit d to delete a result, which simply moves it out of tag:inbox
and into tag:deleted.
Tags are displayed at the right of every result. You can edit the
tags in the minibuffer by hitting t. You can autocomplete tags in
the minibuffer with TAB.
Nevermore has rudimentary support for snoozing messages and threads.
In the results buffer hit s to snooze a result. The result will be
moved out of tag:inbox into tag:later. Note that if you are
searching on tag:inbox, the result will not immediately disappear
from your search results; you need to re-run the search, which can be
done by hitting g.
A snoozed result will be moved back to tag:inbox the following
morning. You can change the default snooze target by changing
nm-snooze-default-target (it starts out as tomorrow 6am). If you
supply a prefix argument to the snooze command (C-u s), nevermore
will prompt you for a target.
Nevermore supports searching for web page archives maintained in jotmuch. Invoke nevermore with
M-x nm-jotmuch
to search your jotmuch database. Hitting RET on a result will open
the original web page in your browser.