* On 03 Nov 2011, Cameron Simpson wrote: > On 03Nov2011 10:05, Edward Morbius <dredmorb...@gmail.com> wrote: > | Is there any facility similar to Gmail's named tags (other than > | folders) for mutt? > | > | I'd like to be able to add (multiple) labels to a given message, > | possible automatically (procmail, some imap tool, mutt folder hooks), > | have mutt be aware of defined labels, and be able to quickly filter > | messages by labels (including and/or/not Boolean logic). > > The X-Label: header is the usual convention for this in mutt-land. > ... [good information elided] ...
I wrote the X-Label code for mutt 11 years ago but recently have been wishing for more capability and better integration with other keywording standards and conventions. (X-Label was invented just for mutt because there were no plausible conventions or standards yet.) If you use X-labels heavily and are comfortable building mutt from source I encourage you to take a look at https://bitbucket.org/dgc/mutt-dgc/qseries and apply at least up to the complete-pattern-y patch. This is the direction that I'd like mutt mainline to go in the future but I'm not comfortable pushing it until it's had more field testing. (That said, I've been using it since April without concern.) Here's the full mercurial commit log for these patches. The xlabel_ext patch is actually quite old, but the others are new this year. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- patch: hashwalk Add reentrant hash_walk() function for iterating down a hash table. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- patch: dgc.xlabel_ext Adds capability to edit x-labels inside mutt, and to sort by label. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- patch: xlabel_complete Adds label completion. A global label hash is added, to which labels are added as they're parsed from a mailbox file or edited manually by the user. Reference counts are kept in the hash table so that unused labels are removed from available completions. Completion is available in the label editor only, but it may be feasible to add for search expressions if the preceding text ends with '~y'. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- patch: keywords Unify label/keyword handling. Since x-labels were added to mutt in 2000, a number of other approaches to what we now call 'tagging' have also emerged. One of them was even made standard in RFC 2822. This update unifies the handling of all these strategies. We start by changing mutt's internal keyword storage from a single string which may contain whitespace to a list of discrete keywords. This has advantages for keyword completion as well as for portabilty among varying "standards" for keyword storage. This may represent a significant change for existing mutt users who have set x-labels containing spaces, and should be regarded with suspicion. The advantages are significant, though. Next we allow mutt to parse keywords into this internal list from any of the following headers: X-Label (freeform), X-Keywords (space-delimited), X -Mozilla-Keys (space-delimited), and Keywords (RFC 2822, comma-space- delimited). Mutt remembers which headers it sourced keywords from, and will rewrite those headers when saving messages for compatibility with the mailer of origin. (X-Label was specified as freeform text by mutt, its only known implementation. X-Labels have been used both as a 'tagging' device, probably with space delimiting, and as a 'memo' field, where space-delimited parsing would ruin the semantics of the memo. By default mutt will not split X-Labels at all. Set $xlabel_delimiter if your needs vary.) Finally we add the save_keywords boolean, which defaults to FALSE. When true, this boolean causes mutt to always save all keywords to the Keywords: header in addition to whatever origin headers were retained for compatibility. Overall this represents convergence path for all competing labelling/tagging/kewording systems toward one that is specified by RFC. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- patch: complete-pattern-y Permit tab completion of pattern expressions with ~y (labels). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- David Champion • d...@uchicago.edu • IT Services • University of Chicago
