written on Tuesday, January 11, 2011
One of the things I really love about open source is that one can find new amazing software often and quite easily. I mean real quality software, not that shitload of crapware/adware that's usually associated with "free" software.
I'm well know for using "alternative" apps, for changing (technical) opinions quite often and for breaking my system a lot (it figures, I have a LFS, Gentoo and - currently - Archlinux background). Turns out that this beta (or rather, alpha) nature of mine gives me the opportunity to try some promising software out way before it gets widely known.
This time I'll write about an application I've been using since early 2010: sup. Sup is an e-mail client that works in the command line and has several neat features hardly found on major clients out there. It's already well known by the bleeding edgers, but surprisingly unknown by most of the nerd/geek/whatever circles I know.
If you are a gmail user, you should be aware of how much tagging helps organizing the flood of e-mails we receive every day. I use sup to deal with a couple of personal accounts and - mostly - with my job's e-mail and I couldn't be happier. Being able to search my e-mail using a gmail-like query language and get results in less than a second really helps out when you need to find that message you thought no one would care, or that meeting agenda you forgot to store in a better place.
Being written in Ruby really eases the creation of hooks for several events and, since I have some experience with the language, even allowed me to hack on the code and create a useful feature for me: contact groups (check my code).
You might be wondering how come being written in Ruby is listed here if it was listed in the section above. Well, if you've ever maintained anything in Ruby long enough you'll probably know how things can break badly from version to version (even minors!). Using a bleeding-edge distribution doesn't help either: most of the packages are either "too new" or just don't work at all. Ever since Archlinux changed it's default Ruby version to the 1.9.x family, running sup became a pain so, to avoid any problems, I have to keep an exclusive rvm setup for it and freeze updates on xapian-core.
There are several console-based e-mail clients out there, but none with the power of sup. If getting over those Ruby issues or using a relatively young software bothers you (and you can live without tags), it might be worth checking out the most well-known and established MUA for the Linux terminal: mutt. Other than that, only vmail comes to mind, which seems a good enough solution if you only use gmail (you gotta be a vim addict too, but who isn't :-).