Most people use Gmail. Some people like CLI mail clients. This post describes how I use Gmail in the best CLI mail client, mutt. Many people will back me up when I say it’s a very good setup. For reference, my complete and current setup can be found with my dotfiles. Offlineimap 🔗Step one is to setup Offlineimap to keep ~/Mail in sync with Gmail. This is a two way sync so anything moved, deleted, or sent from any IMAP-connected device or our local mutt interface will act exactly the same. This also has the benefit of storing offline, local copies of all your mails.

Hopefully, if you’re a CLI junky, you’ve heard of GNU/screen. And if you’ve heard of it, chances are you’re using it. Screen is a terminal multiplexer. This means that you can start screen in one terminal (say, your SSH connection) and open any number of terminals inside that terminal. This lets me have mutt, ncmpcpp, and a couple of spare shells all open inside my single PuTTY window at work.

One of the trickiest things for a new user of XMonad is adding a statusbar. This is mainly because xmonad’s statusbar support is so transparent and extensible, that any documentation for setting it up could be completely different from any other. Do you want a dynamicLog? A customLog? xmobar? dzen? One bar? Two? Here I’ll outline my method. Two separate dzen2 bars aligned to look like one bar across the top of your screen. The left fed by an xmonad dynamicLogWithPP to show workspaces (with coloring and urgencyHooks), the current layout and the current window title. The right fed by conky to show music, system stats and of course the time.

This is a short but extensible script to allow text messaging (to verizon customers) straight from the commandline. Setup requires simply a means to send email from the commandline along with a small script to pass the message off to <number>@vtext.com. If you already have a CLI mailing solution you can just copy the script and go ahead and change the mail command to mutt, ssmtp, mailx, or whatever you’re using.

Mutt can be really great with multiple accounts, but it’s not exactly intuitive to setup. Here I’ll document how I access two Gmail accounts together in one mutt instance. If you haven’t yet seen my previous mutt post, please go read [that][] now. I recommend using that post to get a single account setup first before coming back here. Even if you plan to jump right into a multi-account setup, this post assumes you’ve at least read the other one and will focus on the differences and required changes to get from there to here. Offlineimap 🔗To get Offlineimap syncing multiple accounts, we simply need to add additional configuration blocks to sync the second account with another local Maildir.

So the other day when I was using wifi-select (awesome tool) to connect to a friends hot-spot, I realized, “hey! This would be great as an openbox pipe menu!” I’m fairly decent in bash and I knew both netcfg and wifi-select were in bash so why not rewrite it that way? Wifi-Pipe 🔗A simplified version of wifi-select which will scan for networks and populate an openbox right-click menu item with available networks. Displays security type and signal strength. Click on a network to connect via netcfg the same way wifi-select does it.

One of my favorite modules from xmonad-contrib is the IM layout. It’s a tiling algorithm designed to handle your roster and chat windows in the best way possible. Here I’m going to outline how I set this up in my xmonad.hs. What it looks like 🔗Personally, I want my roster tiled in its own properly-sized location on one side, and all other IM related windows floating. I also want any of those IM windows to automatically be pushed to the IM workspace.

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