I'm using Emacs for my daily tasks, both writing and programming. One question I have to more experienced Emacs users: Can you recommend an email client? It needs to be able to display html mails. Currently, I use claws-mail and am fairly happy with it, except for the search. I've got about 30,000 mails in the inbox and full-text searching them takes too long.
Is there a way to transition my claws-mail folders to Emacs, or ideally use both programs at the same time for a while?
The article recommends notmuch-emacs. But I'm afraid of 2 things, (i) loosing existing mails in the transition (due to e.g. faulty conversion tools), and (ii) that after a complicated transition I'm not happy with the new setup. Any recommendations? Is it possible to use the claws-mail email inboxes directly in Emacs?
Another thing is org-mode. I never really managed to get deep enough into it to really see the benefits. I've even bought the printed org-mode manual, but the setup seems so complicated. Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for?
> Another thing is org-mode. [...] Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for?
I would recommend starting using Org just for note taking, using its outline capabilities. It's simple and avoid being overwhelmed and buried in features. One tutorial for this is [1], but even then it has advanced parts you can ignore at first. There are many Org tutorials, at some point it's best to just pick one and dive in instead of looking for the best one and ending up paralyzed by choice (a problem sometimes with Org and Emacs...).
Then once familiar with this you can extend your usage in various directions: add TODO and agenda for GTD, use it to export to nice web pages with a "read the doc" theme [2], etc.
I use mu4e. No better way of ripping through emails and getting down to inbox zero. When there's an email I need to action I can very quickly turn it into an org-mode task, and then archive it, knowing the task will contain a link to the email body. I rarely have more than 10 emails in my inbox.
Org-mode is like a Swiss army knife. I honestly started using it, unaware of the whole GTD functionality. I was using it as an alternative to markdown, as it allowed me to use CSS with the exported HTML. Then I learned of the GTD aspect and started using that as well. Now I have my init file written in org-mode using babel to drag out the lisp.
For email I like mu4e. I set it up to use Imap it is a bit slow to load up. I had the same fears about losing email, I just created an additional gmail account and forwarded, played around with it till I wasn't concerned anymore.
You don't have to do everything, I just started adding pieces of his .emacs file one at a time until I was happy with way it worked. Very nice if you want to do GTD type open task reviews on a recurring basis.
For email in Emacs, I've previously used VM, and also Gnus for a while, paired with BBDB addressbook and some of my own add-ons.
VM mostly worked very well (and Gnus was probably more powerful than any forum software/site you've ever seen), but there were a few pros&cons of preferences, including being tired of having so much in one Emacs process, so I moved.
One of the biggest downsides of moving email out of Emacs is that I lost the utility of BBDB. Which is doubly a shame because it was written by JWZ, yet Netscape Communicator and later Mozilla things that should've been influenced by JWZ have much-much less useful addressbooks.
If your emails are in anything other than mbox format, then notmuch will not modify your email files - it merely builds an index for them so you can query. That should take care of your search needs.
As for HTML email, if you mean HTML converted to text, then notmuch will do it. If you mean show it as proper HTML, it won't. It can also show images inline (although my setup stopped years ago and I haven't debugged why). To be frank, I don't like how it converts an HTML email to text - it doesn't even preserve links (i.e. it shows the text only, and not the URL it links to). I need to look into how I can improve it.
But despite these headaches, I still use it. It's good.
> One question I have to more experienced Emacs users: Can you recommend an email client?
Contrary opinion from an experienced Emacs user (parts of my init.el are older than many users in this forum): I used to be a fan of Gnus, but then noticed that dragging attachments into E-mails is such a productivity booster than I switched to Mail and haven't looked back. If you are on a Mac, the combination of seamless drag&drop everywhere, Mail.app and LaunchBar simply does not compare to what you get inside of Emacs.
I do feel some regret, because I liked the customizability, but facts speak for themselves: I do things much faster with Mail.app.
Interesting. One of the reasons I switched to mutt (well, neomutt) is that it is faster for me to work with attachements from a cli. This is mostly due to tab completion, which for commonly accessed locations is practically muscle memory. Takes me forever to to click my way there.
I often don't even know what the filenames are for my attachments, or where they are in the filesystem. Some are ephemeral.
I'm guessing you haven't worked with MacOS? Most people coming from a Linux/UNIX backgroupd (I was one of them) tend to assume that MacOS doesn't offer much, especially for advanced users, which isn't true. You can do many things significantly faster on MacOS.
In my case, I drag/drop attachments from other applications, from the filesystem, or from LaunchBar (finding things in LaunchBar is way faster than manually navigating through an entire path using tab completion).
I use org-mode for to-do lists, nested lists with to-dos scattered among them, scheduling stuff, and habits (repeatable variable schedule tasks). Orgzly does a lot for me already, and spacemacs+org-mode lets me edit however I want. I also use spacemacs+deft for quick notes, and org-capture for quickly entering new to-do items.
I didn't really understand org-mode for a long time either - my problem was that I would read tutorials which gave very detailed descriptions about the various theoretical abilities of org-mode, which are like tools, but left up to the reader the task of determining an overall "goal" or workflow to be accomplished using these tools. So I ended up just working in a single org-mode file, not really understanding which tools I might like to use, how I could use it as an organizational system.
For me, the lightbulb moment came from a couple of blog posts called "Building a Second Brain in Emacs and Org-Mode" [0][1], which outlined an actual workflow (based on Getting Things Done or GTD [1]) and explained how org-mode enhanced it. If you follow along, you may find it helpful to see the author's actual emacs configuration (especially the parts that relate to org-mode) [3], the templates he uses to create projects and e.g. weekly reviews [4], and a talk he gave at an Emacs meetup about his workflow. It could be a little more organized in a single place, but this is the best "tutorial" I've ever found about org-mode.
After implementing this myself, I've found that I use certain parts of it a lot, and other parts not at all. I also found that I prefer to periodically refile org-mode notes into a "knowledge repository" (a series of text files in my org-mode directory), rather than in evernote as suggested, and that this is best managed/browsed (for me) using Deft [6] rather than org-mode itself. So I've also managed to extend the system for my preferences a bit.
Sorry for the brain dump - hopefully this answers your question a bit.
Is there a way to transition my claws-mail folders to Emacs, or ideally use both programs at the same time for a while?
The article recommends notmuch-emacs. But I'm afraid of 2 things, (i) loosing existing mails in the transition (due to e.g. faulty conversion tools), and (ii) that after a complicated transition I'm not happy with the new setup. Any recommendations? Is it possible to use the claws-mail email inboxes directly in Emacs?
Another thing is org-mode. I never really managed to get deep enough into it to really see the benefits. I've even bought the printed org-mode manual, but the setup seems so complicated. Can someone recommend a good "light" tutorial for it? What are you using it for?