8 ms·

A vim interface for gmail: Vmail

145 points by ezl 14y ago

wheeee 14y ago
Does this mean that vim is now officially finished?
- tambourine_man 14y ago
  Zawinski's Law Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
  - alexpopescu 14y ago
    Is there a generalization of Zawinski's Law postulating that "Every program should expand until it can read itself"?
purephase 14y ago
This is insane. Amazing, but insane.
dysoco 14y ago
Wow, I love the idea. I have always wanted to manage my mail via terminal, but didn't want to set up Mutt or something similar.
- ef4 14y ago
  Setting up mutt for GMail these days is no harder than setting up vmail. This is a complete config file for mutt that will connect to your gmail account: set folder=imaps://imap.gmail.com:993 set spoolfile=+INBOX set imap_user='your_username@gmail.com' set smtp_url = "smtp://your_username@smtp.gmail.com:587/" If you don't want to enter your password every time, you can set it as imap_pass (for reading) and smtp_pass (for sending).
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    > If you don't want to enter your password every time, you can set it as imap_pass (for reading) and smtp_pass (for sending). If you're on Linux, it's also rather simple to store this in a keyring such as gnome-keyring (Seahorse).
  - leephillips 14y ago
    Exactly. I don't understand the advantage of "vmail" over mutt, which is extremely powerful and mature, and of course can be configured to use vim, -- but I admit I just skimmed the link, so I could be missing something. Note also that you must use caution when using Google's smtp and other network services, as they tend to do whatever they want, regardless of RFCs and standards[1]. [1]http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/ http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
  - raylu 14y ago
    Using Gmail in mutt directly over IMAP is sloooow. It's a bit more work to set up something like OfflineIMAP, fdm, or something else.
pge 14y ago
for vim fans, another option is mutt or alpine with vim as your editor. Both work with gmail.
- madewulf 14y ago
  Exactly, there is pine/mutt/alpine for that.
- antidoh 14y ago
  Yeah. This is cool and all, but it's kind of like modifying your cigarette lighter to carry passengers.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    You could also look at it like carrying a cigarette lighter with you that you like rather than using whatever fire making tool is around when you need one.
- dllthomas 14y ago
  Also nmh, though it can be complicated to set up (especially to set up well). Still meaning to put together a tutorial / description of my setup...
  - CasimirCelerity 14y ago
    That'd be hugely appreciated (at least from me). I've been using nmh+fdm on a trial run for a secondary e-mail account for a bit but would love to see an actual flow blown setup.
math0ne 14y ago
Looks nice man, good work.
rymith 14y ago
Thanks to google killing free Google Apps accounts, I won't get a chance to use this. It's really sad because this is exactly what I was looking for.
- richo 14y ago
  How is this better than mutt with EDITOR=vim ? Not a smartass question.
  - rymith 14y ago
    I honestly haven't used mutt in a while, but I used to have a lot of issues with it. I should give it another go.
    - richo 14y ago
      If you're on OSX, my fork of homebrew has some patches to make threading et al work. https://github.com/richo/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/mutt.rb https://github.com/richo/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formul...
thezilch 14y ago
Does it have support for two-factor auth? In the event of 2FA/MFA, I'm assuming one needs to generate an application-specific password and keep that in the .rc? Alternatively, I see there are requests for using OAuth, which would be a similar approach to have a "token" that can be revoked.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > In the event of 2FA/MFA, I'm assuming one needs to generate an application-specific password and keep that in the .rc? As far as I am aware, this is currently a limitation of any third-party client that connects to Gmail.
  - ephemient 14y ago
    OAuth authentication for IMAP (via SASL): https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/oauth_overview https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/oauth_overvi... I don't know if there are many clients that support it yet, though.
Tichy 14y ago
Why gmail and not email?
kecebongsoft 14y ago
While this is awesome, I am one of those guys who feel uncomfortable to store my raw password in a dotfile, not to mention I'm managing my dotfiles in Github, authentication in every run doesn't seem convenient either. I see that this happens in other places such as Github gists-terminal and some twitter-terminal clients. Is there any way we can store these credentials locally in a safer way like SSH keys?.
- dmmalam 14y ago
  OSX has keychain which is designed for these scenarios. http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2006/01/16/keychain_cli/ http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2006/01/16/keychain... https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Security/Conceptual/keychainServConcepts/01introduction/introduction.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Secur...
  - chimeracoder 14y ago
    Several Linux tools for this purpose have existed for a while as well - gnome-keyring (now seahorse)[1], KWallet, etc. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME_Keyring https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME_Keyring
    - donniezazen 14y ago
      It came to my notice a few days ago that Gnome stored my Google Password in Gnome Keyring as simple text.
      - chimeracoder 14y ago
        How did you come to this conclusion? If you've found a bug, please file a ticket. Gnome keyring definitely uses encryption to store passwords; they take security pretty seriously: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeKeyring/SecurityPhilosophy https://live.gnome.org/GnomeKeyring/SecurityPhilosophy
alexpopescu 14y ago
iawesome!thanks danielESC:wq
- tsm 14y ago
  0~fti ^]2w~A!^]:x<RET>
tmcw 14y ago
Same guy as ViTunes. <3 http://danielchoi.com/software/vitunes.html http://danielchoi.com/software/vitunes.html
baydinalex 14y ago
I love it. For decades, my flame war offensives against the evil crusaders of Emacs have stalled out against their Maginot Line of "But Emacs can be your mail client too!" This is like a Blitzkrieg of flame war glory. PARIS PREPARE TO BE MINE!!!
- yakiv 14y ago
  Victory shall not be yours until your precious Vim has both Tetris and Towers of Hanoi. Emacs shall prevail.
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    What's emacs? Is emacs that editor released by Microsoft?
  - rbonvall 14y ago
    Then victory was ours circa 2004 ;) Tetris in Vim: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=172 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=172 Towers of Hanoi: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=900 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=900
    - yakiv 14y ago
      Hmm . . . the battle may be closer than I thought. Vim still must be inferior somehow, right? :)
eggoa 14y ago
To me, here at work on a Windows machine, that looks like way too many dependencies for me. Looks cool, though.
- bprater 14y ago
  With as much ram as people have on their machines these days, try virtualizing!
  - lowboy 14y ago
    Especially with utilities such as Vagrant[0], for which there are many ready-made boxes[1] that make short work of spinning up new VMs. My main development "box" is a VM on a win host and it works wonderfully. [0]: http://vagrantup.com/ http://vagrantup.com/ [1]: http://www.vagrantbox.es/ http://www.vagrantbox.es/
tommorris 14y ago
This is pretty awesome. I've used Mutt in the past but always found it a little bit over-the-top. This is very, very simple to setup and does the job pretty well. But better than that... oh my word, the documentation. How I wish every command line app had that kind of documentation. Just one page that documents the shit out of it. There's only one thing that would make it better: if that documentation came bundled with the RubyGem so I could read it offline with `ri`.
freshhawk 14y ago
I hope you at least felt some pain in your soul when you wrote a vim plugin for email that was gmail only. Why on earth would you do that?
- alpb 14y ago
  Welcome to Hacker News.
  - pestaa 14y ago
    Well, consider GP's assessment as envy of those who use Gmail and therefore can benefit from this nice piece of software.
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      Yes, that's what I was told when I made similar comments about IE only websites years ago as well. How short of a memory does this community have if they don't understand what comes after "embrace" and "extend"?
      - FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
        So the guy who wrote it uses gmail. There's no ulterior motive there. Just a person who uses gmail who wanted to use it in vim
        freshhawk 14y ago
        Oh certainly no ulterior motive, but these things never have ulterior motives, just good people not doing what they should. I was just curious why it wouldn't be just as easy to make it use imap rather than being gmail specific. The idea of making an email client that only worked with email addresses from a single domain would not even have occurred to me.
        wahnfrieden 14y ago
tibbon 14y ago
Also by Dan: instantwatcher.com
skrebbel 14y ago
cool! plain curiosity: why gmail-only instead of imap?
3amOpsGuy 14y ago
When will we get a "programer's web browser"? I mean a full blown browser of current generation abilities, but with the option of completely keyboard driven interaction. Concise input of small commands (navigation, data extraction, exploring and massaging of extracted data, data uploading etc.) that can be composed to form more complex interactions. It should have full interoperability with the CLI, don't go re-inventing grep, sed etc. but instead stand on their shoulders by interoperating fluently with them. In practice i expect this means the "programer's browser" functions as a full blown terminal emulator too. If it were a text editor (and it should be a competent one of those, but the web is more than a textual medium so some implementations should certainly offer richer functionality than plain text editing) then the net and its many protocols would be its filesystem. It should be extensible, but only by 1 language. Competing programer's browsers could offer alternative extension languages as their differentiator. It should be entirely open for extension, by that i mean more than plugins, i should be able to rip out core parts of it to be replaced with alternative implementations (A's needs won't match B's needs and so on). It shouldn't go too far though, it shouldn't be a full blown operating system: why re-invent the wheel, reuse the thousands of man years effort in existing OS's. It should be multi platform. We almost have the requisite component parts available now, who's going to get the ball rolling with the new wave of "programer's browsers"?
- guitarhacks 14y ago
  http://uzbl.org/ http://uzbl.org/
- djisjke 14y ago
  it's called uzbl
- freshhawk 14y ago
  For now, as has been pointed out, the answer is uzbl. (Almost exactly what you describe is my current dream project, pieces designed, pieces roughed out, no part even remotely finished. The one I will get back to working on as soon as my startup exits and I have money and time. Or when it fails and I have time. You are not alone in wanting this.)
- 14y ago
algorias 14y ago
> To save you keystrokes, Vmail provides alternative key mappings for ,* , ,#, and ,! Unfortunately, vmail doesn't seem to consider internationalization important at all. US users save a single press of the shift key when starring messages (,8 instead of ,*), but on a german keyboard, where the star is shift-3 instead of shift-8, the shift-less version of starring trashes the message instead. Not a typo I'm eager to make. Problems like this are, sadly, way too common.
- icebraining 14y ago
  So, it doesn't implement VIM's remapping commands?
- ninjin 14y ago
  One, just as another user pointed out, remapping is easy. Two, I personally think that most international keyboards I have used have been any good at all for the tasks we face as programmers/hackers/developers. They put an emphasis on producing text, not code, and if you spend most of your day typing code and English anyway I can't see why we should "waste" precious keyboard real-estate. I ditched my Swedish layout during my first year at university, went US-style and remapped the three keys that I needed to type "native" characters to Start-key combos. I haven't looked back since. It was also the point where I started touch-typing.
  - Derbasti 14y ago
    I did that, too. But I constantly switch back and forth when I'm writing German code (think LaTeX). Pure coding is fine, and so is pure prose, but whenever the two mix, its a pain.
mathteacher1729 14y ago
Perhaps it is a silly question, but what advantages does this offer over Gmail's rather robust set of keyboard shortcuts?
jebblue 14y ago
>> vmail important from barackobama@whitehouse.gov Mmm...yeah I think I'll pass but hey, good idea up to that point.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tbirdz 14y ago
It would be great if this had integrated gpg signing and encryption, especially as firegpg doesn't work w/ gmail any more.
dejanr 14y ago
Its ultra slow, almost 5 minutes to open first email? http://d.pr/i/W9iO http://d.pr/i/W9iO i am on mbp retina, ML, ruby 1.9.3, latest vim

145 points by ezl 14y ago

wheeee 14y ago

Does this mean that vim is now officially finished?

tambourine_man 14y ago
Zawinski's Law Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
- alexpopescu 14y ago
  Is there a generalization of Zawinski's Law postulating that "Every program should expand until it can read itself"?

purephase 14y ago

This is insane. Amazing, but insane.

dysoco 14y ago

Wow, I love the idea. I have always wanted to manage my mail via terminal, but didn't want to set up Mutt or something similar.

ef4 14y ago
Setting up mutt for GMail these days is no harder than setting up vmail. This is a complete config file for mutt that will connect to your gmail account: set folder=imaps://imap.gmail.com:993 set spoolfile=+INBOX set imap_user='your_username@gmail.com' set smtp_url = "smtp://your_username@smtp.gmail.com:587/" If you don't want to enter your password every time, you can set it as imap_pass (for reading) and smtp_pass (for sending).
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > If you don't want to enter your password every time, you can set it as imap_pass (for reading) and smtp_pass (for sending). If you're on Linux, it's also rather simple to store this in a keyring such as gnome-keyring (Seahorse).
- leephillips 14y ago
  Exactly. I don't understand the advantage of "vmail" over mutt, which is extremely powerful and mature, and of course can be configured to use vim, -- but I admit I just skimmed the link, so I could be missing something. Note also that you must use caution when using Google's smtp and other network services, as they tend to do whatever they want, regardless of RFCs and standards[1]. [1]http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/ http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
- raylu 14y ago
  Using Gmail in mutt directly over IMAP is sloooow. It's a bit more work to set up something like OfflineIMAP, fdm, or something else.

pge 14y ago

for vim fans, another option is mutt or alpine with vim as your editor. Both work with gmail.

madewulf 14y ago
Exactly, there is pine/mutt/alpine for that.
antidoh 14y ago
Yeah. This is cool and all, but it's kind of like modifying your cigarette lighter to carry passengers.
- freshhawk 14y ago
  You could also look at it like carrying a cigarette lighter with you that you like rather than using whatever fire making tool is around when you need one.
dllthomas 14y ago
Also nmh, though it can be complicated to set up (especially to set up well). Still meaning to put together a tutorial / description of my setup...
- CasimirCelerity 14y ago
  That'd be hugely appreciated (at least from me). I've been using nmh+fdm on a trial run for a secondary e-mail account for a bit but would love to see an actual flow blown setup.

math0ne 14y ago

Looks nice man, good work.

rymith 14y ago

Thanks to google killing free Google Apps accounts, I won't get a chance to use this. It's really sad because this is exactly what I was looking for.

richo 14y ago
How is this better than mutt with EDITOR=vim ? Not a smartass question.
- rymith 14y ago
  I honestly haven't used mutt in a while, but I used to have a lot of issues with it. I should give it another go.
  - richo 14y ago
    If you're on OSX, my fork of homebrew has some patches to make threading et al work. https://github.com/richo/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/mutt.rb https://github.com/richo/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formul...

thezilch 14y ago

Does it have support for two-factor auth? In the event of 2FA/MFA, I'm assuming one needs to generate an application-specific password and keep that in the .rc? Alternatively, I see there are requests for using OAuth, which would be a similar approach to have a "token" that can be revoked.

chimeracoder 14y ago
> In the event of 2FA/MFA, I'm assuming one needs to generate an application-specific password and keep that in the .rc? As far as I am aware, this is currently a limitation of any third-party client that connects to Gmail.
- ephemient 14y ago
  OAuth authentication for IMAP (via SASL): https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/oauth_overview https://developers.google.com/google-apps/gmail/oauth_overvi... I don't know if there are many clients that support it yet, though.

Tichy 14y ago

Why gmail and not email?

kecebongsoft 14y ago

While this is awesome, I am one of those guys who feel uncomfortable to store my raw password in a dotfile, not to mention I'm managing my dotfiles in Github, authentication in every run doesn't seem convenient either. I see that this happens in other places such as Github gists-terminal and some twitter-terminal clients. Is there any way we can store these credentials locally in a safer way like SSH keys?.

dmmalam 14y ago
OSX has keychain which is designed for these scenarios. http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2006/01/16/keychain_cli/ http://www.dribin.org/dave/blog/archives/2006/01/16/keychain... https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Security/Conceptual/keychainServConcepts/01introduction/introduction.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Secur...
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  Several Linux tools for this purpose have existed for a while as well - gnome-keyring (now seahorse)[1], KWallet, etc. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME_Keyring https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME_Keyring
  - donniezazen 14y ago
    It came to my notice a few days ago that Gnome stored my Google Password in Gnome Keyring as simple text.
    - chimeracoder 14y ago
      How did you come to this conclusion? If you've found a bug, please file a ticket. Gnome keyring definitely uses encryption to store passwords; they take security pretty seriously: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeKeyring/SecurityPhilosophy https://live.gnome.org/GnomeKeyring/SecurityPhilosophy

alexpopescu 14y ago

iawesome!thanks danielESC:wq

tsm 14y ago
0~fti ^]2w~A!^]:x<RET>

tmcw 14y ago

Same guy as ViTunes. <3 http://danielchoi.com/software/vitunes.html http://danielchoi.com/software/vitunes.html

baydinalex 14y ago

I love it. For decades, my flame war offensives against the evil crusaders of Emacs have stalled out against their Maginot Line of "But Emacs can be your mail client too!" This is like a Blitzkrieg of flame war glory. PARIS PREPARE TO BE MINE!!!

yakiv 14y ago
Victory shall not be yours until your precious Vim has both Tetris and Towers of Hanoi. Emacs shall prevail.
- darkarmani 14y ago
  What's emacs? Is emacs that editor released by Microsoft?
- rbonvall 14y ago
  Then victory was ours circa 2004 ;) Tetris in Vim: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=172 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=172 Towers of Hanoi: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=900 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=900
  - yakiv 14y ago
    Hmm . . . the battle may be closer than I thought. Vim still must be inferior somehow, right? :)

eggoa 14y ago

To me, here at work on a Windows machine, that looks like way too many dependencies for me. Looks cool, though.

bprater 14y ago
With as much ram as people have on their machines these days, try virtualizing!
- lowboy 14y ago
  Especially with utilities such as Vagrant[0], for which there are many ready-made boxes[1] that make short work of spinning up new VMs. My main development "box" is a VM on a win host and it works wonderfully. [0]: http://vagrantup.com/ http://vagrantup.com/ [1]: http://www.vagrantbox.es/ http://www.vagrantbox.es/

tommorris 14y ago

This is pretty awesome. I've used Mutt in the past but always found it a little bit over-the-top. This is very, very simple to setup and does the job pretty well. But better than that... oh my word, the documentation. How I wish every command line app had that kind of documentation. Just one page that documents the shit out of it. There's only one thing that would make it better: if that documentation came bundled with the RubyGem so I could read it offline with `ri`.

freshhawk 14y ago

I hope you at least felt some pain in your soul when you wrote a vim plugin for email that was gmail only. Why on earth would you do that?

alpb 14y ago
Welcome to Hacker News.
- pestaa 14y ago
  Well, consider GP's assessment as envy of those who use Gmail and therefore can benefit from this nice piece of software.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    Yes, that's what I was told when I made similar comments about IE only websites years ago as well. How short of a memory does this community have if they don't understand what comes after "embrace" and "extend"?
    - FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
      So the guy who wrote it uses gmail. There's no ulterior motive there. Just a person who uses gmail who wanted to use it in vim
      - freshhawk 14y ago
        Oh certainly no ulterior motive, but these things never have ulterior motives, just good people not doing what they should. I was just curious why it wouldn't be just as easy to make it use imap rather than being gmail specific. The idea of making an email client that only worked with email addresses from a single domain would not even have occurred to me.
        wahnfrieden 14y ago

tibbon 14y ago

Also by Dan: instantwatcher.com

skrebbel 14y ago

cool! plain curiosity: why gmail-only instead of imap?

3amOpsGuy 14y ago

When will we get a "programer's web browser"? I mean a full blown browser of current generation abilities, but with the option of completely keyboard driven interaction. Concise input of small commands (navigation, data extraction, exploring and massaging of extracted data, data uploading etc.) that can be composed to form more complex interactions. It should have full interoperability with the CLI, don't go re-inventing grep, sed etc. but instead stand on their shoulders by interoperating fluently with them. In practice i expect this means the "programer's browser" functions as a full blown terminal emulator too. If it were a text editor (and it should be a competent one of those, but the web is more than a textual medium so some implementations should certainly offer richer functionality than plain text editing) then the net and its many protocols would be its filesystem. It should be extensible, but only by 1 language. Competing programer's browsers could offer alternative extension languages as their differentiator. It should be entirely open for extension, by that i mean more than plugins, i should be able to rip out core parts of it to be replaced with alternative implementations (A's needs won't match B's needs and so on). It shouldn't go too far though, it shouldn't be a full blown operating system: why re-invent the wheel, reuse the thousands of man years effort in existing OS's. It should be multi platform. We almost have the requisite component parts available now, who's going to get the ball rolling with the new wave of "programer's browsers"?

guitarhacks 14y ago
http://uzbl.org/ http://uzbl.org/
djisjke 14y ago
it's called uzbl
freshhawk 14y ago
For now, as has been pointed out, the answer is uzbl. (Almost exactly what you describe is my current dream project, pieces designed, pieces roughed out, no part even remotely finished. The one I will get back to working on as soon as my startup exits and I have money and time. Or when it fails and I have time. You are not alone in wanting this.)
14y ago

algorias 14y ago

> To save you keystrokes, Vmail provides alternative key mappings for ,* , ,#, and ,! Unfortunately, vmail doesn't seem to consider internationalization important at all. US users save a single press of the shift key when starring messages (,8 instead of ,*), but on a german keyboard, where the star is shift-3 instead of shift-8, the shift-less version of starring trashes the message instead. Not a typo I'm eager to make. Problems like this are, sadly, way too common.

icebraining 14y ago
So, it doesn't implement VIM's remapping commands?
ninjin 14y ago
One, just as another user pointed out, remapping is easy. Two, I personally think that most international keyboards I have used have been any good at all for the tasks we face as programmers/hackers/developers. They put an emphasis on producing text, not code, and if you spend most of your day typing code and English anyway I can't see why we should "waste" precious keyboard real-estate. I ditched my Swedish layout during my first year at university, went US-style and remapped the three keys that I needed to type "native" characters to Start-key combos. I haven't looked back since. It was also the point where I started touch-typing.
- Derbasti 14y ago
  I did that, too. But I constantly switch back and forth when I'm writing German code (think LaTeX). Pure coding is fine, and so is pure prose, but whenever the two mix, its a pain.

mathteacher1729 14y ago

Perhaps it is a silly question, but what advantages does this offer over Gmail's rather robust set of keyboard shortcuts?

jebblue 14y ago

>> vmail important from barackobama@whitehouse.gov Mmm...yeah I think I'll pass but hey, good idea up to that point.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tbirdz 14y ago

It would be great if this had integrated gpg signing and encryption, especially as firegpg doesn't work w/ gmail any more.

dejanr 14y ago

Its ultra slow, almost 5 minutes to open first email? http://d.pr/i/W9iO http://d.pr/i/W9iO i am on mbp retina, ML, ruby 1.9.3, latest vim