I use NeoMutt to read my email. And I use it a lot. As a result I have many different mailboxes. NeoMutt comes with a nice feature called sidebar which does what you think it does - it splits your terminal screen and displays a list of all your mailboxes in one of the split windows. This is great because now you can see all your mailboxes and you can easily navigate through them to select the mailbox you want to read. Alternatively you can also use the NeoMutt change folder command and then enter the name of the mailbox you’d like to change to.
The problem though is, the more mailboxes you have the longer it takes to navigate through the list. Manually entering the name of the mailbox is also not exactly want I want to do. There are a couple of key bindings you can use to make the navigation easier, but I was still looking for a more elegant solution.
There is another tool I use a lot on the terminal - called fzf. It’s a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder. I mostly use it to quickly navigate through my zsh history. And that actually brought me to the idea why not combine fzf with NeoMutt.
I download all my mail from an IMAP server using mbsync and then store it in a local Maildir folder. I use the following script to generate a list of all the mailboxes that I can pipe as input into fzf:
At the end of the script I have to make sure that the fzf result is passed to the change folder command in NeoMutt which then let me fuzzy search through the list of mailboxes.
The only missing piece is to add a macro into the muttrc configuration file to call the fzffolder script:
When I now press space in the NeoMutt index and start typing some string that is part of the mailbox I’d like to navigate to, fzf immediately brings me to the right folder and I can start reading my mail.
Written on April 2nd , 2021 by Thorsten Scherf neomutt fzf