It is generally accepted as an almost universal truth that mutt sucks, but is the MUA that sucks less than all others. While people use either Vim or Emacs and fight about it, I hardly see any people fight about whether mutt is good or bad. There is, to my knowledge, no alternative worth mentioning.
Mutt dates back well into the mid-nineties. As you might imagine, with lots of contributors over the course of almost two decades, the code quality is rather messy.
When development had stalled for quite a while in the mid-2000's, a fork was attempted. While mutt-ng was quite popular for a while, most changes were incorporated back into mainline mutt at some point. (Ironically, the latest article in the mutt-ng development blog is from October 2006 and is titled "mutt-ng isn't dead!"). The development of main mutt gained some momentum again, triggered in large parts by the contributions of late Rocco Rutte.
I remember two big features that the original mutt authors just wouldn't integrate into mainline: The headercache patch and the sidebar patch. About the former I can't say anything, but lately I've been fixing the Sidebar patch in various places. (We use mutt at work and rely heavily on e-mail communication, so we'd like a bug-free user agent, naturally.)
When all the mutt forking went about five years ago, I didn't know much about it. Retrospectively, I see the people did a hell of a job. Long before mutt-ng was forked, Sven told me he and Mika met in Graz for several weeks to sift and sort through the availbale patches, intending to do a "super patch".
Mutt's code quality is arguably rather messy.
On top of that, the Sidebar patch tries to make it even worse. Imagine this: mutt draws a mail from position (line=x,char=0) to the end of the line. Now the sidebar patch will introduce a left "margin", such that the sidebar can be drawn there. Thus, all code parts where a line is started from the leftmost character has to be rewritten to check if the sidebar is active and possibly start drawing at (line=x,char=20).
The sidebar code quality is a fringe case of bad code. Really, it sucks. However, there's no real way to "do it right", since original mutt never planned for a sidebar.
Who maintains the sidebar patch? – Not sure. There's a version at thomer.com, but he says:
July 20, 2006 I quit. Sadly, there seems to be no desire to absorb the sidebar patch into the main source tree.
The most up-to-date version is found at Lunar Linux. Last update is from mid-2009.
Debian offers a mutt-patched
package that includes the
sidebar patch, albeit in a different version than usually found 'round
the net. In short, this patch is a mess, too.
But since I made all the fixes, I decided to contact the package's maintainer, Antonio Radici. He promptly responded and said he'd happily fix all the issues, so I started by opening two bug reports. Nothing has happened since.
The patches run quite stable for my colleagues, so I think it's best to release them. Maybe someone else can use them. Please note that I have absolutely no interest in taking over any Sidebar patch maintainance. ;-)
For some of the patches I provide annotations. They all feature quite descriptive commit messages, and apply cleanly on top of the Debian mutt repository's master branch.
The first four patches are not by me, they are just the corresponding
patches from the debian/patches/ directory applied to have a
starting point.
The first few patches fix rather trivial bugs.
Now come the performance critical patches. They are the real reason I was assigned the task to repair the sidebar:
This patch fixes a huge speed penalty. Previously, the sidebar would count the mails (and thus read through the whole mbox) every time that mtime > atime! This is just an incredible oversight by the developer and must have burned hundreds of millions of CPU cycles.
This introduces a member `sb_last_checked' to the BUFFY struct. It
will be set by `mh_buffy_update', `buffy_maildir_update' and
`buffy_mbox_update' when they count all the mails.
Mboxes only: `buffy_mbox_update' will not be run unless the
condition "sb_last_checked > mtime of the file" holds. This solves
a huge performance penalty you obtain with big mailboxes. The
`mx_open_mailbox' call with the M_PEEK flag will *reset* mtime and
atime to the values from before. Thus, you cannot rely on "mtime >
atime" to check whether or not to count new mail.
Also, don't count mail if the sidebar is not active:
Then, I removed a lot of cruft and simply stupid design. Just consider one of the functions I removed:
-static int quick_log10(int n)
-{
- char string[32];
- sprintf(string, "%d", n);
- return strlen(string);
-}
That is just insane.
Now, customizing the sidebar format is simple, straight-forward and mutt-like:
sidebar_format
Format string for the sidebar. The sequences `%N', `%F' and
`%S' will be replaced by the number of new or flagged messages
or the total size of the mailbox. `%B' will be replaced with
the name of the mailbox. The `%!' sequence will be expanded to
`!' if there is one flagged message; to `!!' if there are two
flagged messages; and to `n!' for n flagged messages, n>2.
While investigating mutt's performance, one thing struck me: To decode a mail (eg. from Base64), mutt will create a temporary file and print the contents into it, later reading them back. This also happens for evaluating filters that determine coloring. For example,
color index black green '~b Julius'
will highlight mail containg my name in the body in bright green (this is tremendously useful). However, for displaying a message in the index, it will be decoded to a temporary file and later read back. This is just insane, and clearly a sign that the mutt authors wouldn't bother with dynamic memory allocation.
By chance I found a glib-only function fmemopen(),
"fmemopen, open_memstream, open_wmemstream - open memory as stream".
From the commit message:
When searching the header or body for strings and the
`thorough_search' option is set, a temp file was created, parsed,
and then unlinked again. This is now done in memory using glibc's
open_memstream() and fmemopen() if they are available.
This makes mutt respond much more rapidly.
Finally, there are some patches that fix various other issues, see commit message for details.
There you go. I appreciate any comments or further improvements.
Update 1: The original author contacted me. He told me he's written most of the code in a single sitting late at night. ;-)
Update 2: The 16th patch will make mutt crash when you compile it with -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2. There's a fix:
0020-use-PATH_MAX-instead-of-_POSIX_PATH_MAX-when-realpat.patch (thanks, Jakob!)
Update 3: Terry Chan contacted me. All my patches are now part of the Lunar Linux Sidebar Patch.
Update 4: The 15th patch that uses open_memstream uncovered a bug in glibc. See
here and
here.