This is a proposal for a terminal gui for notmuch mail, written in python. Currently, it is more a sketch of a framework, so let me explain the key ideas here: * OOP approach using python * aim at the look and feel of sup for now * use libraries whenever possible. urwid: http://excess.org/urwid/ mailbox: http://docs.python.org/library/mailbox.html obviously the cnotmuch bindings: https://bitbucket.org/spaetz/cnotmuch/ (urwid-satext: http://wiki.goffi.org/wiki/Urwid-satext You need the cnotmuch python bindings and urwid to run it. I run it like this > python ng.py -l debug.log -d debug and "tail -f debug.log" in another window. See settings.py for global bindings. Here is an overview of the current architecture. ng.ui.UI contains the main component: it - handles the urwid.MainLoop that manages the screen etc. - contains a logging.logger that can be used for log/debug messages like so: ui.logger.info('hello logworld') - sets up and updates the header/footer/body widgets - is able to open/close/focus buffers (there's a list ui.buffers of currently known buffers, and a ui.current_buffer, pointing to the focussed one) - handles global keybindings. See below for more on bindings. - can apply (and further down the road undo/redo) commands (see command.py) - should be able to open a prompt/dialogs? for user input. This is still missing ng.db.DBManager is the door to the notmuch index. Currently, it has very limited functionality, but should be able to to this: - store the connection settings (index path and whether or not we use a read_only connection..) - two basic methods for reading from and writing to the index. Lets call it dbman.query(querystring) and dbman.update(updatestring). query will return a notmuch.Query object, i haven't bothered with update so far. - a method for all interesting operations on the index These will use self.query/update accordingly. See dbman.count_messages for a simple example ng.buffer.Buffer Is used as a base class for different types of buffers, or display-modi if you like. So far there's only a SearchBuffer (might be a bad name) that displays the result of a search for mail threads, and a BufferListBuffer, that displays a list of buffers. Technically, ng.buffer.Buffer inherits from urwid.AttrMap. This is done so that it can be directly be set as the body-part of the main gui, thereby intercepting (and filter/handle according to local bindings) the key presses. A Buffer - is a widget, that can be drawn,focussed etc as all widgets. - has a pointer to the main ui, a typename, (e.g. search results, display single thread, envelope, logmode) and knows how to summarise itself. - knows how to handle local (mode-specific) keybindings (self.bindings see below) ng.commands.Command Again, a base class for different commands. A command is an object that represents an atomic action. It will only be be applied once (and is then stored in a undo-list somewhere). It - has a typename, that is used to identify a type of command for the command factory - can be applied using cmd.apply with a fixed interface: I assume we want at least pointers to the main ui and the dbman objects here - should contain a help-info about what it does (to automagically create dynamic help-buffers later on) - should know if its undoable, and if so, implement undo() and redo() - points to pre and post hooks. This might get tricky with undoable cmds.. The idea is, that a cmd gets applied (see ng.ui.UI.apply_command), also its pre and posthooks are called if defined. These should have the same signature as cmd.apply(). See settings.hooks for an example. There's a number of commands i already implemented. Each one should be created by the ng.command.factory (which also attaches the hooks) ng.widgets contains the urwid.Widgets i use do draw notmuch objects. There's a Threadline widget for example, that knows how to present a notmuch.thread object as a textline. Should be pretty self explanatory, definitely needs some love. These inherit from AttrMap, which is not very clean i guess, but they must be "selectable" so that we can use them in a urwid.ListBox (which displays a list and can focus elements). Since ThreadlineWidget is selectable it must include a dummy keypress method. ng.hooks this should later on include methods that look for and call? hooks. The idea is that a user might define either python callables or paths to binaries, and ng.hooks.get_hook(hookname) retrieves them so that they can be placed in commands. This might be a totally stupid idea ng.walker Contains urwid.ListWalker derived classes that implement a listwalker (the content-part of a urwid.ListBox widget) that dynamically allocates its content. The thing is that if one makes a query for all threads in the index and naively creating a ng.widgets.ThreadlineWidget for each and placing them in a urwid.Listbox (actually a urwid.SimplieListWalker, and /that/ in a listbox), one this will potentially eat up your memory and take a long time. So ng.walker.IteratorWalker will dynamically create its next element from the next element of the iterator. For now, there's a NotmuchIteratorWalker class that does the same for notmuch's one-time iterators. This is almost certainly a bad idea methinks. Bindings Are currently a hash in objects of the classes ng.ui.UI and ng.buffer.Buffer. Obviously, a key is first handed to the current buffer and in case it doesn't handle it, it will be handled by the main UI. Each buffer-subclass comes with its own default local bindings which whi might want to overwrite at some point. I guess we should have a "map" command that takes a buffertype, a key and something to call. For now, a key in the binding hash is a string that represents a keypress (urwid style: 'shift j', 'k' etc are valid). The value is then a pair of (commandtypestring, parameterhash), that is used by the command.factory to instantiate a command with of type commandtypestring with parameters parameterhash. Values in the parameterhash will be called at cmd creation by command.factory if callable. See self.bindings in ng.buffer.BufferListBuffer for an example.