I’m up at 6 a.m. and feeling sorta awake. I feel that my living on the travel run has caught up with me, my lymph nodes are the size of walnuts and I keep sneezing thus, I cannot sleep, thus I type. I hope that work’s requirements will allow me to check out some tunes on the shared Mac users’ iTunes shares, slurp some green tea, and parse my bazillion emails. I have to be honest, I’m dreading that. I eradicated my mail quota before I left (it’s good to be king) so there’s no telling how bloated my inbox is with people sending me mails that want to ‘get buy-in’ or ’leverage synergies’ or ‘what the hell happened to X’.

I recently got a new computer and decided to set up Mutt locally on it. Here’s how to get to reading mail with Mutt in a way that supports HTML and multi-byte character sets. This is not a perfect HOWTO (especially in the mutt ./configure section), but should get you most of the way there. Use Darwin Ports sudo port install rxvt-unicode sudo port install tokyocabinet (if you’re going to talk to an IMAP host and want to cache the data, you need a db to cache into) sudo port install w3m (for displaying HTML mail) Set up your shell to help mutt with multibyte export LC_CTYPE="en_US.

I love usig the mutt mail reader to turn through my mail. I recently set it up to make use of my MacVim installation by adding the following configuration to the .muttrc. set editor="mvim --remote-tab-wait-silent " This is pretty neat. When I go to reply or compose, I’m thrown into a new tab in MacVim and I can compose / reply there. After hitting ZZ or :wq!, mutt properly handled the signal, but didn’t change OSX’s focus back to the terminal window where Mutt was running. By changing the editor to the following configuration: set editor="osascript $HOME/bin/mutt_edit.sh" I was able to tell Mutt to send my temp file (for the edit) to osascript, a utility that runs Applscript.