Re: Running mutt on Mac OS X
I'm a long time Linux user (RedHad, Slackware), and last year when the new
iMac with OSX 10.5 came out, I couldn't resist -- but with a lot of
trepidation.
My worries were completely unfounded. True, some things work differently
than what you may be used to. You'll have to find those yourself. The
following goes beyond your question, but maybe you'll find it useful.
In my case, after doing a lot of googling, I immediately installed both
Fink and MacPorts in order to "get some things I was used to". Turned out
to be unnecessary (at least for me), and eventually, I got rid of them
both, completely. The console things I wanted that weren't included, I
compiled using the built in tools with no problem. The GUI things I
wanted, I was able to find Mac versions of. Except Ghostscript. Haven't
found a postscript reader (free) for OS X. But I just got used to the
builtin ps to pdf converter. I had trouble finding a decent (free)
newsreader, but finally settled on OSXnews 2.081. It has some issues, but
generally works pretty well (http://OSXnews.sf.net). I would advise
holding off on Fink and MacPorts unless you find they are absolutely
necessary.
Another thing -- I thought I'd be using the built-in X-windows a lot.
Eventually decided it was a pain in the neck (although it works pretty
well, except for not using some of the native mac capabilities and look --
and cluttering up the toolbar). The things I really wanted a gui for were
available in a mac-cocoa or carbon version.
Things to get: First thing: get MacVim. Uses the core vim but with a Mac
cocoa gui wrapper. It's great. http://code.google.com/p/macvim/. I'm
using MacVim to write this email as the editor used by Mutt. I compiled
mutt from source with no problem.
Another thing you might want to look into: NeoOffice as the OpenOffice
version for OS X, (I don't have the url handy, but it's easy to find).
There are a lot of choices for a web browser (and for text only browsers to
use with mutt.) I used Firefox for quite a while, and while I like it's
plugins, it started starting an X which it seemed to not be using, and I
had to terminate by hand. Strange. I submitted a bug report, but got no
response. I finally switched over to Camino (http://caminobrowser.org/).
And the final thing I'll mention: The XCode IDE, the Cocoa platform for
programming Mac applications, and Objective-C, the language used by Cocoa.
But that's another story.
Best,
John Velman
On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 01:08:39PM -0500, Trey Sizemore wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009 11:40:15 -0600, "Kyle Wheeler"
> <kyle-mutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > On Friday, January 2 at 12:13 PM, quoth Trey Sizemore:
> > > I'm contemplating getting a MacBook Pro laptop. As a long-time Linux
> > > user, I'm concerned about getting mutt running the way that I've got it
> > > setup on my Linux machines.
> >
> > For what it's worth, I share my muttrc (and related files) between all
> > of my machines, which includes both Linux and Mac boxes, without any
> > trouble.
> >
> > > For those running mutt on Mac OS X, how easy/hard was it to get your
> > > .muttrc 'adapted' to run?
> >
> > I didn't have to do anything to the muttrc. The only thing that needed
> > some extra entries was, obviously, the ~/.mailcap file and the
> > ~/.urlview file. I say obviously because the commands needed to open
> > various file types are different on OS X. For example, to open a URL
> > in your web browser, you can just use the `open` command. But that's
> > got nothing to do with your muttrc.
> >
> > Here's how I've set my mailcap up - there are simpler ways of doing
> > it, but I add all the test segments so that the correct command is
> > chosen by mutt.
> >
> > # this uses xv only if there's an X server, and only if I have xv
> > image/*; xv %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY" && type xv &>/dev/null
> > # this uses open only on OSX and only if I'm not using ssh
> > image/*; open %s; copiousoutput; test=test "`uname -s`" = "Darwin" -a -z
> > "$SSH_CLIENT"
> >
> > Though I recently discovered there's a cooler way to view images on
> > OSX:
> >
> > image/*; qlmanage -p %s 2>/dev/null; test type qlmanage -a -z
> > "$SSH_CLIENT"
> >
> > > Does urlview work as expected,
> >
> > Yes, generally (you have to configure it), but I prefer
> > extract_url.pl, because it's better at handling unusual and more
> > modern email encodings that allow URLs to be broken into multiple
> > lines.
> >
> > > are you using vim for the editor and did you get your vim
> > > configurations ported over ok?
> >
> > ...ported? I use the same vimrc for all of my machines as well.
> >
> > Seriously, I think you're building this up in your mind as some kind
> > of gargantuan task, and it's really quite simple. As long as you don't
> > rely on /usr/bin/sendmail (which is usually asking for trouble
> > *anyway*), and as long as you know the right commands for all your
> > viewers (on OSX, the right command is almost always `open`), you'll be
> > just fine. The only way you could possibly have much trouble is if you
> > have a lot of extremely machine-specific stuff in your muttrc.
> >
> > ~Kyle
>
>
> Thanks Kyle. Hopefully it *is* just a case of building this up to be
> more than it is. ;-)
>
> I remember having to do a lot of 'tweaking' a while back when I was
> trying to get things setup on a FreeBSD install, so I assumed (perhaps
> wrongly) that the situation might be similar with OS X.
>
> By chance, are you using the default Mac terminal program, iTerm, or
> something else entirely for the terminal?
>
> Thanks!
> --
> Trey Sizemore
> trey@xxxxxxxxxxx