A Man And His Mutt - Hooking Up
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As someone who's gone through the experience, I can tell you that relearning the keyboard every time you switch to a new mail client can be quite painful - which is why one of Mutt's nicest features is the ability to customize its keymap.

For example, I personally prefer to use

c

to compose a new message, and

m

to switch mailboxes. Mutt's default keymap, however, works in the reverse manner. And so, my Mutt configuration file contains the following commands:

bind index c mail                    # "c" -> new message in index
bind index m change-folder           # "m" -> switch mailbox in index
bind pager c mail                    # "c" -> new message in pager
bind pager m change-folder           # "m" -> switch mailbox in pager

In a similar manner, you can assign keys to other functions as well. Here's another example, which maps the forward slash symbol (/) to the search command, as in vi,

bind pager / search

A complete list of the functions available in each of Mutt's menus is available in the manual, together with the default key assignment for each.

It's also possible to create keyboard macros, which allow you to execute a sequence of commands using a single keystroke. The most frequently-used example of this is setting up the external "urlview" program to harvest URLs from an email message and browse to them using lynx.

These commands set things up so that hitting

^u (that's Ctrl-U)

within the index or pager launches urlview and displays a list of URLs found in the message.

macro index \cu |urlview\n                # "^u" -> launch urlview in index
macro pager \cu |urlview\n                # "^u" -> launch urlview in pager

Mutt also allows you to alter your configuration on the basis of specific rules - a feature referred to in Mutt-lingo as a "hook". For example, suppose I wanted to sort all messages in one mailbox by date, and messages in another by sender. Normally, I would have to manually resort the data each time; however, with Mutt's folder hooks, I can have it taken care of automatically.

folder-hook =inbox set sort=date-sent                    # sort inbox by
date
folder-hook =lists/melonfire-dev set sort=threads     # sort mailing lists
by thread

In addition to folder hooks, Mutt also offers hooks for saving and sending messages. Take a look at the manual, or the sample configuration files listed at the end of this article for more details.

>>> More Administration Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire