vmail - Check your Gmail from within vim

When I said I loved the command line, I wasn’t kidding. Therefore, of course, when I need to edit text files, I use vim. It’s just the right choice.

So it’s with a small amount of pain that I show you this interesting little project today. A common criticism that text editor (vim) fans throw in the face of operating system fans (emacs) is that a text editor should simply edit text. vmail, by Daniel Choi, lets you check your email from within vim. Here’s a (slightly outdated) screenshot:

How cool is that? Like I said, I’m slightly torn, but it’s still pretty freaking cool.

Installing vmail is pretty easy. Just

$ gem install vmail

As always, this means you need Ruby. To configure vmail, you need to make a .vmailrc file in your home directory. It should look something like this:

username: dhchoi@gmail.com
password: password
name: Daniel Choi
signature: |
  --
  Sent from vmail. http://danielchoi.com/software/vmail.html

If you leave the password part out, it’ll just prompt you for your password when you start vmail. Doing that, by the way, is easy:

$ vmail

You can also pass in arguments to vmail: they let you filter via either a label, or search terms:

$ vmail mailing-lists
$ vmail from steve@steveklabnik.com

There are approximately one billion options that are supported by vmail, so if you’re interested, you can check out the project homepage to learn everything you need to know.

[GitHub] [README] [Homepage]