tui, the interface for gen x nerds
I first said that I might be switching over to using email in the terminal. After that, I talked about Inbox Zero.
After a lot of experimentation, I found a setup that works for me, so I'm going all-in with TUI for my email.
TUI, as in Text User Interface, is as computery as it gets. The email client I've decided to run with is NeoMutt, and for one main reason. It has something regular Mutt does not called New Mail Feature. If NeoMutt did not have this very specific thing, I wouldn't have bothered with it, and I'll get back to this in a minute.
My NeoMutt setup is a combination of POP3, IMAP, getmail and server-side filters. It's complicated, and I'll leave it at that. I don't think anybody who uses Mutt or NeoMutt does it simple, because why bother with the plain stuff when you can customize the bejeezus out of it.
As complicated as my NeoMutt setup is, the end goal was to have very minimalist email that works. Did I get it? Yes. Mission accomplished. The complicated stuff is done, and now NeoMutt just sits there and does its job.
The older I get, the more minimalist my computing becomes. Having email as a terminal text-based thing brings a feeling of calm and peace. The experience could even be described as zen-like. At some point I may even go to the next level and pare down my Linux setup to using an ultra-lightweight window manager like Openbox. Or maybe Xfce, which while not ultra-lightweight is something I always got along with in the past.
This is not to say I want TUI-everything, because I'm not about to start using the internet that way. But where email is concerned, TUI truly is a proper fit since it's just all messaging.
However, there is one GUI thing I wanted, and wow was it a fight to get it, but I figured out a way. In fact, what I'm about to describe is a battle I've had to engage in every few years for one reason or another.
First, rewind the clock back to the late 1990s.
Microsoft Outlook Express had this very nice thing where when a new email arrived, an icon would appear next to the clock. That was your mail notification. The "full" Outlook had this too. Also very nice.
That little icon, while not sounding like all that much, was really convenient. You didn't have to open a window to check your email. If you had a new-mail icon down there at the clock, you had new mail. If not, no new mail. Simple, easy, and almost perfect.
Where things got perfect, at least for a while, was with Mozilla Thunderbird. You could still get that icon in the tray for new mail, but also something else. With the right plugins, you could "close" Thunderbird, but instead of it closing, it would minimize and HIDE itself. How did you get Thunderbird back? Look for the little Thunderbird icon next to the clock. Click-click, and up pops your email. Click the minimize OR close button in Thunderbird when done, and it keeps running but hides itself away. If there was no new mail, a little plain Thunderbird icon was displayed. For new mail, it changed to a different icon of your choosing. And as soon as you read all your new mail, the icon would automatically switch back to the no-new-mail icon. Brilliant setup.
This setup is commonly known as minimize to tray. It means, "When I click minimize or close in my email program, keep it running, but hide it, show a tray icon next to the clock that I can click to bring up the email program when I want, have that icon change to show whenever there is any new mail in the inbox, and also change back to a no-new-mail icon when all new mail is read."
Only two email clients in Linux I know of mostly do this right, Sylpheed and Claws Mail. You can configure either so when minimize is clicked, it stays running, hides, shows an icon in the tray, changes the icon whenever there is new email, the changes it back when all new mail is read. Clicking the tray icon brings up the program. However, if you click X to close the program, it just closes. You can't do the "clicking minimize OR close just minimizes to tray" thing. Like I said, it mostly gets it right.
I do not have minimize-to-tray for NeoMutt, but I was able to come up with the next best thing.
NeoMutt's New Mail Feature allows the client to fire a command or a script whenever new mail arrives. A simple example of that would be to fire notify-send -t 5000 -a "NeoMutt" "You have new mail" for a 5-second desktop notification. And yes, there are ways to pass over the subject line and other stuff in the notification if desired.
However, that's not what I wanted. I needed an icon that appears and stays there where I can see it.
I tried getting an icon to appear in the tray, but nope, nothing I did worked. Just when I was about to give up, I had the the thought it might be possible to change the Konsole titlebar instead. Did some experimentation, and yes, THAT worked. Whenever a new email arrives, NeoMutt fires a script, and the titlebar changes to show a light bulb emoji icon followed by "new mail". That's exactly what I needed. And this is one of the very few instances where I was happy emoji icons existed, because it saved me the hassle of having to figure out how to show a PNG in the titlebar area.
After that, I needed a way to reset the titlebar. It was much easier to figure this out. I assigned a NeoMutt macro to F8 that runs a tiny script to change the titlebar text. Done. Yes, it has to be done manually, but at least I don't have to restart the client. There is probably a way to automate this using folder-hook, but I'm fine with what I have because it works.
Is this as good as minimize-to-tray? No, but it's good enough. The only GUI thing I wanted was that new-message icon notification, and got it. Considering the fact that NeoMutt by its very design doesn't do graphics at all, I think I did okay.
Why did I go through all this crap?
It's for minimalism as mentioned above, nostalgia because it reminds me of BBS messaging back from the early '90s, futureproofing so I have an email UI that absolutely does not change, and understanding that text is text.
The worst messaging experience is in a graphical web browser. All web browsers are memory-hungry pigs. Add in images, audio, video, emojis, bloated code, badly written JavaScript, servers getting blasted with millions of data requests, and the whole thing is miserable to use. It doesn't matter if it's email or social media. The experience of using messaging in the graphical browser sucks because of all the garbage intertwined with it.
Messaging is about the text. No graphics are required to read text. Strip all the crap out, and messaging gets better instantly.
Only when messaging is experienced in something like NeoMutt does one truly understand how weighed down a graphical web browser actually is. This is when mini PCs and refurb Dell Latitudes start looking really attractive. You get one of those, yank out the drive, slap in a 500GB SSD if it needs one (you don't need anything more than that for a host drive), install Linux, install your TUI programs like NeoMutt and whoa-ho... wow, it's really, really fast with no choke anywhere.
If you're wondering, yes, others have tried to do the text-only thing with social media like Facebook. I'm not talking about a "lite" or "basic" version, but rather a very stripped down text-only experience. It's an unfortunate truth that programs and apps that deliver a social media text-only experience never last. As is the way of things, the platform will inevitably change something (by design?) that makes text-only programs/apps break.
With email, as long as your account has POP3 and/or IMAP access, you can still strip it all down to just text.
TUI for email use is awesome.
applying inbox zero to email with mutt
Inbox Zero is a workflow philosophy. You have a bunch of messages sprawled all over the place, everything is a total mess, and the end goal is to bring order to that chaos.
Achieving Inbox Zero isn't about having zero messages in the inbox, but rather about eliminating clutter. Uncluttering eliminates stress, and establishes better control over your life.
I've been using the Inbox Zero philosophy for years, but I had to figure out how to apply it to Mutt. I did find a way.
Before I explain that, I'll first describe how I used Inbox Zero with the Thunderbird email client. You can actually use Inbox Zero with any email client or email in the browser, but Thunderbird is the one I know.
Correction: I'll complain about text messaging on the phone first, then describe Inbox Zero with Thunderbird.
This needs to be said, because this complaint is legitimate.
Most messaging apps on phones do not have an archive feature. To archive means to move messages to a different place, but have it be accessible. In other words, move messages out of the inbox once you're done with them, just like you would in email by moving messages from one folder to another. You don't want to delete, because you may have to bring up that message later. All you want to do is move it elsewhere to unclutter that inbox and get it clear.
It should be stupidly easy to do this on a phone, because messages are messages whether emails or texts. But with most texting apps, you have no ability to move messages. For any message you receive, you have only two options. Delete it after reading, or let it stay there forever. Both options suck.
Keep in mind this isn't even a privacy thing. All you want to do is MOVE the message somewhere else in the app. But again, on most messaging apps, no such feature exists, and that's stupid.
With email, it truly is easy to move an email elsewhere.
For example, let's say you buy a thing on Amazon, such as a hideous three wolf moon sweater to show off your awful fashion sense. And maybe you complemented that with a beer hat, because screw it, why not.
So you order that stuff. Amazon will send you an email after purchase confirming the order as they always do. Right.
This is where Inbox Zero comes into play.
That confirmation email is now a to-do, and stays in the inbox until the stuff you ordered arrives in the mail or you go pick it up. Once you have the stuff you bought, you move that email out of the inbox to the archive folder.
Said another way, for the entire time that email sat in your inbox, it was an uncompleted task. Once the task has been completed, you archive the email. Easy enough to understand.
In Thunderbird, all it takes to move an email to the archive is the press of one key, A. That's it. And if later on you say to yourself, "What the hell was that crap I bought a month ago?", just run on over to the archive folder and the email with all the info you need is there.
Keeping the inbox clear is an absolutely brilliant way to separate not-done from done tasks, truly.
And now you can understand better why it's so infuriating that you have no way to do this with most phone messaging apps. All your text messages are just one big ol' honkin' totally unmanageable list. Stupid.
The Mutt method of Inbox Zero
In the way most nerds use the Mutt email client, all the email is in the inbox. True, you can create separate IMAP folders, but it's better to have all the mail in a single place, especially if bouncing around from computer to computer.
Mutt does support label assignment. While that does help with message management, it can be more trouble than it's worth.
The secret sauce to making Inbox Zero work in Mutt is the use of two things. Flag and Limit.
Flagging is synonymous with "starring" a message. To flag any message, highlight it and press F. And yes, it's a capital F. An exclamation point will be then shown next to the flagged message in the message index. To remove the flag, press F again. This will be important to know in a moment.
After that, press l (lowercase L). "Limit to messages matching:" appears. Type this:
~N | ~F
...and press Enter.
The inbox then only shows two types of messages. New ones, and flagged ones. If you need to view all messages again, that would be l (again, lowercase L), type all, press Enter.
For any email you want to stay in the inbox as a to-do, flag it. Once the task is done, remove the flag on the message, set Limit to all, then set Limit to ~N | ~F again. I have this set up as Mutt macros to do this real fast. F5 to set Limit to view all messages, and F6 to set Limit for flag+new.
The main difference between the Thunderbird way and the Mutt way is that with Thunderbird I physically moved mail to a different folder, while in Mutt I just use a filtered Limit view to show flagged+new messages. The end result is the same, and I was able to get the same sense of Inbox Zero in Mutt that I had in Thunderbird.
With a Limit view of new+flagged set, new messages still appear when they arrive, flagged messages stay visible, and all the other messages stay hidden. I don't have to worry about juggling around message labels or date ranges or whatever. It's a beautiful thing.
You don't need Mutt to achieve Inbox Zero
Originally, I started figuring out Mutt to get out of GUI hell with my email. That isn't a part of Inbox Zero, but at the same time kind of is. You wouldn't think a mouse-less, graphic-less email client could bring a better sense of order (and peace?) to messaging, but it does.
I'm not going to tell anybody to switch to Mutt. Kind of a big learning curve there. It's a nerd's way of doing email, no question.
Most people use email in the browser. Thankfully, all the popular free email providers make it easy to archive messages.
If you ever looked at your email and see nothing but a giant ball of chaos in your inbox, clear it out. Don't delete messages. Use the archive feature, move all that crap to the archive folder, and then treat your inbox like a to-do list.
Inbox Zero is truly achieved once you actually feel good using your email or whatever messaging system is being used. You shouldn't have the feeling of, "Ugh, I have to use this thing again.." If you feel that way, Inbox Zero helps relieve that stress.
The majority of messaging apps on phones are complete dumpster fires, but email is something you have a lot more control over. All it takes to make email feel good again is to start clearing that inbox and make use of the archive folder feature.
switching to terminal based email. maybe.
I've been using email since the late 1990s, and learned early on that the best way to use email is with client software. Browser based email a.k.a. webmail has always sucked. The same can be said for email on the phone. I don't use email there, but if I did, I would use a mail client app.
In the early days, my go-to was Microsoft Outlook Express 6. Later on, I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird and have pretty much stayed with that ever since.
However, there's a problem when using a GUI mail client like Thunderbird, and it's the same problem webmail has.
Unwanted changes due to "upgrades".
Browser based email, be it Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or whatever can change at any given time, and there's not a damned thing you can do about it. The changes will always be labeled as new-and-improved, but that doesn't mean you'll like them. In fact, you'll hate them. Over time, you'll begrudgingly get used to the changes you didn't ask for. And then when you finally get somewhat comfortable with the stupid changes that were made, yep, you guessed it, more changes happen that you didn't ask for. Rinse and repeat.
GUI mail clients typically don't change, but other things gum up the works in how it functions. And this is where Thunderbird can become a steaming pile of crap real quick.
I've had to "upgrade" Thunderbird several times over the years. Every upgrade was forced. The forced upgrades were due to a number of factors. OS changes, plugins that "required" newer Thunderbird just to work, and so on.
Believe me, if it were doable, I would run Thunderbird version 3.1.20 forever, but nope, can't do that.
Presently, I run Thunderbird version 60.9.1, and that's only because I was forced off of 52.9.1 due to emoji issues. I'm not kidding. In Linux, any emoji displayed in a subject line or body of a message goes super-giant sized. Yes, there are workarounds, but they're too annoying to deal with. The only fix was to use version 60. I mostly got everything I wanted working there that I had in 52.
And oh yeah, version 60.9.1 is old, released November 2019. However, it works. The plugins I have, along reading messages in plain text for better security, using regex filters to sort and get rid of junk without issues, having the ability to schedule future emails and so on, it's all good...
...for the moment.
There is going to come a point in the future with whatever Linux I'm using where Thunderbird 60 simply won't work, possibly before 2027. And I'm not about to use modern Thunderbird, especially since they switched over to "requiring" an upgrade EVERY MONTH. I can only imagine how often that will break plugins. Screw that.
Are there alternative GUI mail clients to Thunderbird? Of course there are. Are any of them any good? Nope. I've tried a few, and there's nothing available I really get along with. And even if there were one that did agree with me, all it would take is one "upgrade" of the software with some new-and-improved b.s. to the UI to screw everything up.
The only way out of GUI hell with email is to remove the GUI entirely, and that's where a 100% text based terminal email client is the solution. A client of that type is the only one where absolutely nothing can screw up how my email looks and functions.
There are several terminal email clients for Linux, but Mutt is always the first one mentioned because it works well.
Whether it's Mutt I go with or something else, it's not so much the client that matters as does what happens before the client is launched. In Thunderbird 60, I have plugins that handle all the regex filtering, sorting and everything else within the client. With a terminal email client, things like filtering have to be handled outside the client first. There's a learning curve with this stuff, to be sure.
Is it worth it to go through the hassle of figuring this stuff out? Yes. Once done, I then have an email environment a) doesn't change unless I want it to, b) looks/functions exactly the same no matter what computer box I'm using, and c) will continue to look/function the same with newer versions of Linux in the future.
The first emails I ever sent were done using a terminal
Sort of.
My first online experience wasn't internet. It was Bulletin Board Systems a.k.a. BBSes. I'm not going to explain what those are. See BBS: The Documentary if you want to know more. The overwhelming majority of those systems were MS-DOS based. The PC I had at the time I was using BBSes had MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.
To get on a BBS, I would usually exit Windows, launch a DOS BBS client, the software would dial the phone number of the BBS, I'd connect and do whatever. Sometimes I would write messages to other people.
Don't ask me what the first message was that I wrote to somebody else, because I absolutely don't remember. In fact, I don't even remember which BBS it was where I wrote my first message.
I do remember that the first electronic message I ever wrote to somebody else was on a BBS using a PC with DOS. I know a PC technically isn't a terminal, but whatever, close enough. The point is that everything was text mode only. DOS client, no GUI, no mouse, just text. The only thing that could be considered fancy were BBSes that had a message editor like IceEdit that took advantage of ANSI colors. Messages themselves were plain text, but the editor used a very basic theme that used ANSI colors to look cool.
What is funny and ironic is that if I commit to using internet email using something like Mutt, that's basically the same as the DOS BBS messaging experience. In fact, I could, if I wanted to, recreate the BBS IceEdit look with Mutt. Not that hard to do. This makes me wonder if anybody has made a BBS-like IceEdit theme for Mutt. Maybe? Who knows.
Nostalgia is not the driving factor for wanting to switch to terminal based email. The fact I can make it look BBS-like is just a bonus. I know I can't run Thunderbird 60 forever, so if I can get my email working to my liking with something like Mutt, I eliminate the GUI hell problem. At least for email.
casio watch strap broke, replaced battery in another
Something that happened on one of my Casio F-91W watches (I own two) is that the strap decided to break. In the way the F-91W is made, the strap is not attached with spring bars, but rather pressed-in pins with no springs involved. Technically, yes, you can remove the pins to attach another strap, but not without a small mount of destruction. Not on the lugs themselves, but within the lug holes the pins go through. If you have ever removed pins from an F-91W, you know what I'm talking about. An F-91W can have its pins removed only a handful of times before they become too loose to stay within the lug. After that, you have to use thin superglue applied used those super fine applicator tips just to keep an F-91W lug pin from falling out.
I've not replaced the strap and may not even bother. But I did replace the battery on another Casio that I've had for almost a decade if not slightly longer.
Recently, I've started wearing my AE1000W again. The WS1600H is nice and totally works, but I just felt like wearing something else.
I noticed the LCD display had a little fading happened going from function to function, and button presses were a little slow to respond. It was time to replace the battery, which on the AE1000W is a CR2025.
Thankfully, replacing the battery on the AE1000W is a simple process for the most part. The strap does not have to come off. Four screws need to be removed from the rear. The rear plate comes off after that, peel off one protective sticker, and then comes one of two slightly difficult parts. The metal piece holding the battery down has a shape similar to that of a light bulb. At the "top of the bulb", you take tweezers, get down into the case, flip a little flap, then the battery comes out easily. Insert new battery. Push the metal piece down so that flap snaps back where it needs to be. The second slightly difficult part is touching the AC point to start the watch again. It is labeled, but barely visible. Find that tiny hole, stick tweezers in there, press lightly, and the watch starts right back up. Put the protective sticker back, then put the rest of the watch back together. Done.
Casio digitals are the second easiest watches to replace the battery, depending on model. The AE1000W is easy, as is the AE1200WH, W218H, W800HG, and others. One that I know is not easy at all to replace the battery is the AE1500WH (the strap has to come off), but that's an outlier. The majority of Casio digitals keep it simple.
It is a good idea to have a small watch repair kit to make replacing the battery on a Casio easier. I have one, and have used it several times. You get the little jeweler's screwdrivers and the appropriate tweezers needed. Even if you don't use the other stuff in the kit, believe me, it is worth the buy. You don't want to be futzing about looking for those tools when you need them just to replace a battery. Better to have everything in a little kit with its own little case you can zip up and put away until needed again.
Casio is second easiest for battery replacement, but the absolute easiest isn't Casio, it's almost any Swatch watch. You absolutely don't need a watch press or any other specialized tools. In fact, no tools are required at all. All you need is a coin to take out the battery from the rear, put in the new one, done.
Swatch is the watch that could convince even the most diehard mechanical watch fan to go quartz just because of how stupidly easy it is to replace a battery in one. Which battery is used depends on model, so it could be a CR1220, CR2016, CR2032 or possibly something else. But no matter what it is, getting to the battery for replacement is ridiculously simple.
I may get a Swatch one of these days, but for now, I'm okay replacing batteries in my Casios.
navigation without drama
To my amazement, I'm still using the Drive 53 I bought about a month ago. The reason for the amazement is that I own better models, with one of them being the 7" screen 76. I could use that right now if I wanted, but instead, I use the 5" 53 that has no traffic reporting, no Bluetooth, no Wi-Fi, no voice control, and I'm getting along with it quite well.
There are several reasons I really get along with the 53, but one sticks out in particular that I didn't expect.
I described the I'm Done Moment recently, but there's another one, the I'm Good Moment, as in, "Yeah, I'm good. This works."
With the 76 and a few other models I have, you can talk to it to issue commands, like it's right out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That might sound cool, but it isn't for me. I've never liked talking to a computer to make it do something. In fact, I hate it and always have. It doesn't matter what computer it is. Talking to a computer is annoying, stupid, and causes stress; this is especially true if you have to repeat yourself just to make the stupid computer understand your command.
I had the I'm Good Moment with the 53, which I didn't expect at all, and it occurred due to the lack of "advanced" features. The 53 doesn't have voice control, so it's not even an option. And I am 100% okay with that.
The lack of other advanced features in the 53 has actually made driving more enjoyable, and I didn't expect that either. There's less drama in the drive overall.
I'm using navigation now that's more or less the same experience as it was in the late 2000s. The screen might be new, but with a back-to-basics yesteryear navigation style. As it turns out, that's exactly what I prefer.