With that being said, I will first explain in words what my setup is, how it works, and why it makes sense to do it this way…then I will include all relevant configuration files along the way.

So I have Mutt, and my massively customized .muttrc. It includes where my folders are located, how I want key bindings to behave, colors, PGP settings, key bindings hooks for sending from the appropriate addresses, how i want to edit and view my headers, that I want to use vim to edit email, how email threads should look, blah blah blah. Below is my muttrc in all of its glory. I have painstakingly commented all the relevant pieces so everything makes sense to the normal person (and to me when I forget what stuff does. I have excluded certain pieces to avoid getting spammed :p )

I use vim as my email composer and there are a few tricks to get vim to play well with mutt.  Here is a snippet from my vimrc that enables spellchecking for mutt files and a few key bindings to may my mail look pretty when I’m done slapping on my keyboard.

Pretty self explanatory if you’re familiar with vim.  Enables spellchecking for mutt composition and gives me F3 – F5 for nice paragraph formatting.

As far as the F key mappings and reply hooks go, this is how I send from multiple addresses in Mutt easily. Whenever I want to send as a certain address I just hit the corresponding F key from within mutt and then go on composing merrily. The reply hooks ensure that I always reply as the address the email was addressed to. Reply hooks essentially work the same as send-hooks except backwards. They are not very well documented in the Mutt manual, which is a shame because they are extremely useful in cases like this.  The F keys source profiles that I have in my .mutt folder, they all must identical (except for different values in the variables of course) since they are sourcing out the same information.  Here is a skeleton profile that I use:

As you can see, each profile contains a path to the correct signature for that profile, setting the “send from” variable, passing the correct arguments to msmtp (which will be covered later), and setting the status bar to show which profile I am actually using…in this case al3k is the profile.  The default profile sourced is set in my muttrc (see above) and I can switch them out at will by hitting F7 through F12 in Mutt.

Now this is how I view and compose mail, sending and receiving is a different story; I will begin with how I receive my email. Bottom line, offlineimap is awesome. I realize Mutt has built in imap support, but it is mega slow and I would rather have a local copy anyways. From the offlineimap project github site, “You get a current copy of your messages on each computer, and changes you make one place will be visible on all other systems. For instance, you can delete a message on your home computer, and it will appear deleted on your work computer as well. OfflineIMAP is also useful if you want to use a mail reader that does not have IMAP support, has poor IMAP support, or does not provide disconnected operation.” The one downside to this is that it’s tough to find a solution to store your passwords in a secure way. For now I just store them directly in the file as I have an encrypted disk. In the future I would like to whip up a simple python keyring to store these safely, gnome-keyring and kwallet are waaaay too bloated for me to feel worth using them. Here is my .offlineimaprc

Just insert your username and password where needed and chmod 0600 the file. The nametrans function just uses a regex to translate the goofy gmail virtual folders into names that actually make sense. Feel free to change the names of localrepository and whatever else, just my setup…doesn’t have to be yours.

The, I use this short script stolen from the Arch Linux wiki to quickly daemonize a program that i place in ~/build/start_daemon (offlineimap occasionally crashes and becomes a resource hog, this takes care of that problem):

And then set up a cron job to run this every five minutes:

Ta da! offlineimap is syncing your local copy of your inbox with gmail every 5 minutes, all changes made at any point will be reflected everywhere, plus you have an offline copy of your inbox to work with!

For sending mail, I use the lightweigh msmtp and it works awesomely for me.  You saw above that each profile sets the sendmail command, which is smtp followed by the argument -a and the name of the profile.  This makes it extremely easy to send from different smtp servers and email addresses at will.  Here is a skeleton .msmtprc that is similar to the one I use:

With that setup you can send from the different accounts via msmtp -a <accountname>, works pretty well for me.
As far as PGP signing/encrypting goes, it’s rather simple as well.  I borrowed a piece of configuration from another guy who was nice enough to write about his mutt setup and combined it with some gnupg configuration to get a very nice PGP + mutt combination.  As you can see above in my .muttrc I source a file called ~/.mutt/gpg which contains all of my gpg settings and looks like so…

I know that just looks to be a bunch of jibberish but I do promise that it does work.  The setup is generic and should work for anyone, I won’t bother explaining it since I feel it is well commented but the short version is that Mutt just needs to be spoonfed the commands it needs to perform PGP actions on email.  This, in conjunction with a few settings on your .gnupg/gpg.conf, will make Mutt a secure email machine.  Here’s the relevant pieces you will want:

Pretty simple, all this does it set what public keyserver you want to use, MIT is extremely popular and I’m pretty sure they all propagate to each other anyway, and will automatically retrieve public keys when you receive mail from someone who stores their key on the server(s) as well.  The last line will automatically sign all encrypted messages to yourself as well as the recipient so you don’t get encrypted out of your own sent email :p
Lastly is my coloring, but that is really just a matter of taste.  I use 256 color profiles as well so it may not be compatible with everyone’s setup.  I’ll go ahead and post my colorscheme here and a screenshot, but that pretty much makes covers everything I do in Mutt.  I have yet to work on getting a real good mailcap going so I don’t have anything worthwhile to post here, but I will check back in when I have something worth sharing.
Here’s my color setup:

And here’s a few screenshots of my Mutt in action. Excuse the crappy pictures, I was on my Mac (not by choice) at the time and I personally think the console looks cartoony as hell. I’ll get some better ones up later.

Here is how my full setup looks, in fancy gallery fashion.

Hope this helps out people looking to get a jump start on mutt, or those looking for some more advanced tweaks to make mutt more awesome than it already is.  Leave a comment if you have any questions, or really just anything to say.

In order to get this to work in the console for all users, stick this in your /etc/rc.local (this is an Arch Linux example, you just need this to be in a file that will be ran as root during startup):

This should make it so Caps Lock is remapped to escape at all times in the virtual consoles. If you wanted it to be remapped to control, just substitute “Control” for “Escape” there towards the end…simple enough.  Or you could just use Vim

In order for this to take effect in X, I use Xmodmap to remap the keycodes. The way I do it is to stick these two lines in the file ~/.Xmodmap:

Then in my .xinitrc have a line that says:

You can run that command in the console and, since it will be run at every boot, it will be a persistent setting. Having escape at a much more reachable position makes productivity soar…at least for me. It allows me to Vim and Vimperate at a much faster speed. Hope this helps! Post comments if you have any questions, I am happy to help.

Here is a simple bash script that will determine whether a module is loaded and insert/remove accordingly:

I have this script located in /usr/local/bin/toggletp.  bcm5974 is the name of the macbook’s touchpad driver and swarp is a program that will move your cursor to specific coordinates on the screen.  Unfortunately there is no way to disable the mouse cursor in X so my solution was to move the cursor to the very bottom right corner of the screen where it can’t be seen when the module is disabled.
Now we are going to need a simple sudo wrapper since modprobe/rmmod require root access:

Now in order for you to be able to execute this script requiring root access without a password, you will need to edit the sudoers file to allow this. I tried using setuid originally until I realized that setuid doesn’t work on shell scripts

Here is the line I use in my sudoers file:

Wheel is just a group that my user belongs to. This is just the bsd style way of managing root access. This line allows you to execute the toggletp script as root without a password. Make sure that you set the executable bit on these scripts and lock down access since they can execute commands as root without passwords.

Now, these are the relevant lines from my DWM config.h so set the keyboard shortcuts for my scripts:

The third line and the last line are the chunks relevant to this guide. Copying these lines into your config.h will make it so that every time you press MODKEY+Z, it will execute the sudo wrapper for toggling your driver (mine is located in the build directory in my home folder). Now recompile dwm, reload, and , if everything worked out correctly, you should be able to toggle your laptop touch pad on and off at will with a simple keyboard shortcut!

Leave comments if you have any questions, I’m happy to help. Also, I cannot take credit for the touchpad driver bash script, a friend of mine came up with it and I modifed it for my use.

What you’re going to need: xmodmap (to map keycodes to octal codes so dwm doesn’t bitch), xev (to get the correct keycodes for the keys you want to use), and mpc (just a simple cli client for mpd that takes simple parameters).

Here we go:

Use this snippet to start xev and get only the info that we need:

Once that has started, the press the keys you want to use for play, next, previous etc and write down the corresponding keycodes so you remember.

Use your favorite editor to open up .Xmodmap (name doesnt really matter, this is just what I use) and insert something to this effect:

Map whatever your keycodes might be to F and then some incremental number (F30,31,31, etc etc. I just used arbitrary numbers). You can ignore those first two line, I use them to remap my capslock key to escape (which is extremely useful if you’re a vim user…or you just realize how useless capslock is).

The run this to make the keymaps stick:

In order to make that change permanent you will need to add that line to your .xinitrc as well.

Now to editing the dwm code. These are the relavent lines from my config.h:

You will want to add the mpc and mpd lines exactly as they look there, carefully minding the ,’s and ;’s since this is C code. The 0′s where the modkey should be just mean that there is no modifier key required. Recomplie DWM, reload, test and voila! The keys you mapped should now control mpd as you wish!

Leave some comments if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to help.

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/18595

“Alek Rollyson, a third-year in information systems and the club’s president, said there is a difference between free software and open source software. Free software is like “free beer, or free as in it doesn’t cost me anything,” he said.”

This is the travesty I am referring to.  While 98% of people reading this article have no idea where the fault lies, that 2% of people are the one’s I am concerned about.  I was bashed by several blogging sites for being a poor open source representative and not knowing a thing when it comes to the open source community. I assure you, this is not the case.  Here’s how the quote should have gone..

“A lot of people see a fundamental difference between free software and open source software.  When you say “free”, most people immediately think of  free in the monetary sense or the famous quote, “free as in beer”.  When I say free software, what I actually mean is free as in liberty.  I am free to share, study and modify the program however I want.  Free software implies that the user is free.”

Since it has been a month or so since this story was printed and the interview took place, I cannot recall the exact words I used. But, I can assure you they were in the same context.  I am not sure whether the reporter just misunderstood what I said, whether I was just unclear in the interview (which I accept is entirely possible), or the reporter just locked down on that “free as in beer” quote in order to draw some more attention.  In any case, I can assure you that is not what I said or what I meant.  The whole purpose of this post was to get it out and indexed by search engines so that hopefully when people come and look me up they can see the correction and know that I am not, in fact, a moron.  I am holding no grudge against the reporter, in fact I think that he did a relatively good job, I just felt it important that I clear my name of what is just a misunderstanding.

grab the nicklist script from irssi.org

then move said script into your irssi scripts folder

then fire up irssi and issue these two commands:

Presto!  now you have a nicklist inside of irssi.  Beware of this script however, it does not play well with certain terminal,mrxvt for instance.  There are ways to autoload scripts in irssi but I honestly didn’t use it long enough to be moved to figure it out.  I suggest you check out weechat.

And now, for your viewing pleasure…..a scene from office space, so you can enjoy it as much as I did

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ8SefiNEcs

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM1VuN5Iouc