Some of my problems with Mutt are a result of having occasionally to use Hebrew. On Linux, Mutt will work passably in any terminal and permit the reading of Hebrew emails. It needs only to have “bidiv” installed and defined in .muttrc. The limitations are that: (a) RTL subject lines will be backward (b) Both rtl and ltr emails will appear on the left-hand side of the page, (c) an rtl enabled editor must be used, and (d) Some email clients, such as Yahoo and Fastmail deal poorly with rtl plain-text messages. They will be aligned in the left margin with end of sentence punctuation on the wrong side. Messages that contain single ltr words will appear with the sentence order garbled.

If one wants a more complete multilingual environment for Mutt, there seems to be only the mlterm multilingual console. In mlterm, it is necessary to disable bidiv in .muttrc. Then rtl subject lines will be correct, reading of rtl emails will be easier, and it is possible to choose from a number of different console text editors such as Emacs, Vim and Mined. Getting the fonts right for Hebrew seems to be more difficult than for Arabic. I spent a lot of time playing with that until choosing a size 20 font, which was a lot more legible. So Mlterm is the way to go for rtl. However I ran into problems. Mlterm seems less stable than Gnome Terminal, especially with console text editors. Every editor I have tried causes a terminal to crash at odd times, such as when scrolling to the bottom of the screen. So I’ve given up with all of them and gone back to Gui editors that are capable of writing in Hebrew. Gedit seems to be the most successful so far. I’ve yet to try Gvim or the gui version of Emacs

I’ve been spending some more time with plain text, the console and email programs

Email clients

Although I’ve embraced Mutt as an email client, in parallel I’ve also been in a fight to find a better system. I revisited Evolution and Thunderbird and tried Claws too. I thought that if I would use Evolution with OfflineImap, things could go better. But I had a great deal of difficulty with the Nametrans that is supposed to make that possible and in parallel, continuing problems with crashes on sending emails. And sometimes the program would refuse to shutdown properly. I abandoned it as unstable. With Thunderbird, my problem was that it would choke on my email store and become unusable for precious minutes, so I gave up on that too. In fairness, I did not give Claws enough time: there were some problems, again due to Imap. In order to use Claws with OfflineImap, I would need to set up a mail server, such as Dovecot. But I didn’t feel like playing around even more. I already had a mail client that works (Mutt) and decided I should stick with it.

In the beginning I found various obstacles to using Mutt. There’s something about looking at a console that (for a person that became used to a gui), generates panic. It’s like groping around in the dark. For instance, I found it difficult to attach files. And did not understand properly how to get my search results from Mairix (the search engine that can be used with Mutt). There are also so many things that can be configured with Mutt that this too took me a while. The temptation to just go back into online Gmail was and remains great. But slowly I’m getting used to Mutt and discovering its power. I can see how so many people get hooked.

Plain text editors

For my editor in Mutt, my options are somewhat limited since I also need to use Hebrew. There is one console that is supposed to work with right to left languages: mlterm. I haven’t studied it. Besides that I can use Gedit, Yudit or a KDE program like Kate. I’ve stuck with Gedit so far for my email editor.

But when I’m not writing email, I need only English. So there my options are wider. I can use practically any of the myriad text editors that exist on Linux. I prefer an editor that offers syntax highlighting for Markdown, but I haven’t settled on one single editor so far. I’ve tried Gedit, Scribes, Cream (a Gvim variant with more intuitive shortcuts), Joe, Pyroom and Retext.

Console

In all my 12 or 13 years with Linux I’ve probably never spent as much time in the console as in recent weeks. One of the things that I’ve learned to do in the last couple of days has been to learn to upload my console-powered static blog (under Blazeblogger), without going into Filezilla. I found a recipe for a simple LFTP script on the web. At first it didn’t work with my server. I didn’t understand why, but then found that I needed to add a line to LFTP’s configuration file (set ftp:ssl-allow no). Using this script takes another hurdle out of blogging with my static blog. It’s all about psychology, after all.

Working offline

There’s something about the internet that makes me want to restrict the time that I spend there, at least in the classical way of surfing the web and participating in social networking sites. So I’m devising a number of ways to avoid this. First of all, I’ve started not to visit Twitter.com, and to avoid entirely sites that only permit me to follow conversations when Online. I’d rather use a client like Gwibber, which allows me both to follow what’s being said on Twitter and Identi.ca while offline. I can also post my own status, of course, which somehow I feel more comfortable about doing when I’m offline. It may not so conventional but for me the future of social-networking involves being able to read all of my messages in one central location outside of a web browser, just like email.

Gwibber is not really an “offline” client, but only a desktop social networking client. However most of the articles I read on the web I discover first either in my RSS feeds or on Twitter. RSS does allow me to read many of those articles offline. I aggregate them under Opera. It makes them look like email, but recent changes in Opera have improved their appearance. The problem of course is that many sites do not provide a full rss stream but only a line or two from the article. Then I need to visit their web pages. There’s an additional problem that when I want to bookmark these sites, my method for doing that has been to use Pinboard. I use Pinboard not so much because I want to share these articles, but because I don’t so much like Opera’s bookmarking system. So I have to follow the link to the original site even though I have already read the article. Now I’m thinking that instead of visiting the original articles, I will flag or label them like email messages under Opera. It’s true that this will mean that some articles are flagged, and that others are shared on Pinboard; but anyway I subscribe to my own rss stream on Pinboard, so it doesn’t matter: they all end up in Opera’s email system.

I’ve also been playing with wget in order to download articles rather than visit their websites (a la Richard Stallman), but that’s just an experiment that I’m still thinking about.

Offline Email experiments

Unhappy with lags and crashes in Evolution, I began working with Mutt – a terminal-based email client. There’s a comparatively easy way to set this up using Mutt’s built-in IMAP and Gmail support. That’s a good way to try it. I found I liked it enough to continue the experiment. But what I really wanted to do was to become a little more independent of a constant online connection, and therefore began to configure it to work with Offlineimap. That’s a bit trickier. And, in addition, although everything looks fairly easy at first glance, I found that many questions arose during the process. So it ends up being many hours of work to both configure and learn how to work with the system. In the process of working with email that are many aspects that seem obvious, but are not so when we are presented with multiple options. Fortunately, in the case of a popular program like Mutt, the web is full of excellent tutorials and information.

Because Mutt is just an email manager, it is still necessary to find ways of handling the other parts of my workflow. We use Google Calendar at work to schedule things. Evolution syncs very well with that, and Gnome3 includes the events in the calendar it shows at the top of the screen; bringing up notifications that sometimes arrive in time. For handling tasks, I want to use either a single plain text file based on Markdown, or Emacs Org-mode. Gvim or Cream can collapse sections like Org-mode. Org-mode has many other features. I’ve only scratched the surface. For a longterm time investment, it might be better to go with Org-mode; though it’s really overkill when it comes to my fairly simple needs.

Choosing an email editor is a hard decision in Mutt, because there are so many good ones. But for now I’ve decided to use Gedit, just because it is one of the few that, without any extra-steps, enables me to easily write emails in Hebrew.

Viewing plain text files

There’s a very nice, ancient, and oft-forgotten multi-platform console-based file manager known as Midnight Commander. By default, it opens with a 2-pain view that is intended to enable easy movement of files from one directory to another. But it has many other features, and one of them is to permit viewing the contents of plain text (or other) files on the right, while one browses through the file list on the left. That’s a great, super-fast way for browsing through a bunch of plain text files. So last week I extracted all my journal entries from Redbook and various word processing formats, and converted them all into single-entry plain text files, whose file names begin with the date, and sometimes included a hint of what they contain, such as “2011-12-31-offline-email”. That way all of my journal entries are easily browsable (and searchable). It isn’t necessary to open each one separately in order to read the contents, and they are easier to browse through than in a self-contained program like Redbook.

I’ve been playing around with plain text editing and editors and for the first time discovering their simplicity and power. I knew that it was possible to create formatted documents using LaTeX processors, but had always assumed it was something that would be technically beyond me or more trouble than it is worth.

Now, after learned a little about Markdown, I’ve seen how easy it is to create from an uncoded plain text document perfectly formatted documents in .odt, pdf, .html or other formats. Complexities like structured headings, page numbers, tables of contents, other tables, captioned images and many other things can all be included. The secret is to add a few tiny formatting marks, which do not in any way disturb the readability of the text, and then to run the document through a script called Pandoc which is in any Linux repository and may already be included in the distribution. The command required can be as simple as “markdown2pdf test-pandoc1.text”. For most of my needs, this combination of Markdown and Pandoc is adequate.

Text editors are a joy to use. They are quicker to power-up and less distracting to work with than word processors. There are no complicated commands, ribbons or tool bars to worry about. They use few of the computer’s resources. Depending on the editor, the background can be made colorful, monochrome or transparent. And one can use the same editor to produce any type of document.

I’ve played with a few editors over the last couple of weeks. My current favourite is Cream, which is a simplified version of GVim (one of the most powerful editors on Linux). One thing I like about Cream is that it is easy to wrap and unwrap text. This means that the program can fill the screen, but lines will wrap where I want them to. It has syntax highlighting for Markdown. Another good distraction-free editor is Scribes. It looks great, and is very powerful. One can even run Pandoc without leaving the program.

An advantage of text editors is that from the point of view of a writer with simple text editing needs, there is little real difference between using one or another of them. The text they produce can be opened and will look identical in any other text editor or wordprocessor. Finally, plain text files are lighter than anything produced by LibreOffice or MS Word, and the format is never going to change.

I have still not succeeded, really, with an offline mail experience that satisfies me. Partly because I have in parallel been trying to implement a “getting-things-done” (gtd) style task management system. (I use the reference to David Allen’s system loosely and feel obliged to add this comment since so many bloggers and software developers talk about methods that seem quite far from Allen’s system.) Opera’s implementation is quite nice, as discussed, and would be fine for ordinary personal email. But it lacks some features that would make it more suitable for good office management. It’s necessary to go to Google for contacts, calendars, etc. In addition, checking and downloading all those messages placed it under considerable pressure.

Thunderbird has more Gmail integration through various plugins. For example, I found one that adds Google’s search operators like to:name and from:name, has:attachment, etc., which I use a lot. Some things still do not work, such as synchronization with Gmail tasks. Even more than Opera, I found that the offline imap placed the system under a lot of pressure. Sometimes it would become unresponsive. And as mentioned in a previous email I don’t really like the mbox system.

On the basis of good reviews, I decided to try Gnome’s Evolution again. After installation, it remembered my previous configuration from a few months before (though I didn’t try working with it seriously at that time). I think it added, of its own accord, an account for its newer imap+ implementation, and I disabled the previous one. At first everything looked good. It synchronized with the server, Google calendar and Google contacts surprisingly well. But slowly I am discovering bugs and things that do not work as they should. Among these:

• Purging tasks crashes the system
• Impossible to create a task or memo from an email.
• Impossible to edit notes after they have been created. Update: saw how to do this eventually.
• No ability to send an email to a Tomboy task – though this is supposed to be possible.
• Problems with focus (if this is the right jargon): Clicking on the Evolution icon in the Unity Dock does not return one to Evolution from another program. The workaround is to minimize the program that is hiding it, or click on the Evolution link in the notifications area. A similar issue exists with dialog boxes: once I had to ‘kill’ the Evolution process in the System Monitor. Update: this seems to have been a problem only with one session.
• Problems with offline imap: it isn’t possible to specify offline imap in the accounts preferences. It’s possible to right click on individual folders to request offline use. But even after I do so I find that some messages are still unavailable.

That’s all too many too many major bugs (and there may be more) in a system which is supposed to be so central to Gnome. But according to the reviews, it’s still way-ahead of Kmail, which I previously used very successfully over an extended period.

As mentioned at the beginning, I’ve been trying to set up a gtd style system which I will be happy with, but which will work with both Google online and offline, so this also a factor in choosing how to work with these programs. I might even use Mutt or Gnus, but there are lingering problems with Hebrew support, which I also need for about 10% of my emails.

Update: I’m still using Evolution, despite the described problems. For my gtd solution, I star a message then delete it from the inbox. It shows up in the Starred folder, and sometimes add a reminder in Tasks. For messages that cannot be dealt with quickly, either because they require input from someone else or a series of actions, I move them to a folder called Action. I haven’t quite decided whether to use Tasks for writing notes on these messages, or whether to use Emacs Org-mode. When messages have been dealt with, I remove the stars, and will remove them from the action folder. Some types of messages I will still store in special folders, rather than just in All Mail.