[sup] / doc / UserGuide.txt

Welcome to Sup! Here's how to actually use it.

First, try running 'sup'. Assuming this is your first time, you'll be
confronted with a mostly blank screen, and a notice at the bottom that
you have no new messages. That's because Sup doesn't have any messages
in its index yet, and has no idea where to look for them anyways.

If you want to play around a little at this point, you can press 'b'
to cycle between buffers and 'x' to kill a buffer. There's probably
not too much interesting there, but there's a log buffer with some
cryptic messages. You can also press '?' at any point to get a list of
keyboard commands, but in the absense of any email, these will be
mostly useless. When you're bored, press 'q' to quit.

We need to add some messages to Sup. In order for Sup to know about a
message, it must be in the index. In order for Sup to load a message
into the index, it must know about the "source" in which it
resides. Sup stores all information necessary for search, and all
state we have about a message, in the index, but doesn't duplicate the
actual contents of the message itself. So when you search for messages
or view your inbox, Sup just talks to the index (stored locally on
disk), but when you view a message, Sup must request it from the
source.

So let's tell Sup about some sources. Run 'sup-import' with a URI
pointing to an email source. The URI should be of the form:
- mbox://path/to/a/filename, for an mbox file on disk. (You can also
  just provide the filename).
- imap://imap.server/folder or imaps://secure.imap.server/folder for
  an IMAP folder. (Leave the folder blank for INBOX.)
- mbox+ssh://remote.machine/path/to/a/filename for a remote mbox file.

Before you actually import messages, you need to decide whether you
want them to be archived or not. An archived message will not show up
in your inbox. (Your inbox in Sup is, by definition, the set of all
all non-archived messages). If you specify --force-archive, messages
imported at *this* time will be archived, but new messages will go to
your inbox. If you specify --archive, messages imported at *any* time
will be automatically archived. (This is useful for sources that
contain high-traffic mailing lists that you don't want "polluting"
your inbox.)

Typically you'll want to specify --archive for every source you import
except your actual inbox. You can also force all messages to be marked
as read; run sup-import --help for details. The default is to preserve
the read/unread status from the source.

Now run sup-import to add the source. If it requires a username and
password for the source, it will prompt you. Either way, it will add
the sources to Sup, and immediately start loading messages from them
into the index. Depending on the size of the source, this may take a
while. Don't panic! It's a one-time process.

Now, before we run 'sup' again, take a moment to edit your
~/.sup/config.yaml file. Replace "Your Name Here" with your name,
"your.email.here@domain.tld" with your email address, and fill in your
.signature file if you choose. You can also set the default editor.

We're finally ready to run 'sup'. You should see the most recent
loaded messages appear in your inbox. Congratulations, you've got Sup
working!

If you're coming from the world of traditional email, there are a
couple differences you should be aware of at this point. First, Sup
does not use folders. Instead, you organize and find messages by a
combination of search and labels (knowns as 'tags' everywhere else in
the world). I like to say that 95% of the functionality of folders is
superceded by a quick, easy-to-access, and powerful search mechanism,
and the other 5% by labels. (The Sup statement of philosophy has a
little more on this.)

Search and labels are an integral part of Sup because in Sup, rather
than viewing the contents of a folder, you view the results of a
search. I mentioned above that your inbox is, by definition, the set
of all messages that aren't archived. This means that your inbox is,
in fact, the result of the search for all messages with the label
"inbox". (It's actually slightly more complicated---we omit killed,
deleted and spam messages as well.)

So you could replicate the folder paradigm easily under this scheme,
by giving each message exactly one label and only viewing the results
of simple searches for those labels. But you'd quickly find out that
life can be easier than that if you just trust the search engine, and
use labels judiciously for things that are too hard to find with
search.

But enough chit-chat! Let's take a look at your inbox. You'll see that
Sup groups messages together into threads: each line in the inbox is a
thread, and the number in parentheses is the number of messages in
that thread. (If there's no number in parens, it means there's just
one message.) In Sup, you rarely operate on an individual message. The
idea is that you rarely want to operate on a message independent of
its context; you typically want to view, archive, kill, or label all
the messages in a thread at one time.

Use the up and down arrows to highlight a thread. ('j' and 'k' do the
same thing, and 'J' and 'K' will scroll the whole window.  Even the
left and right arrow keys work!) By default, Sup only loads as many
threads as it takes to fill the window; if you'd like to load more,
press 'M'. You can hit tab to cycle between only threads with new
messages.

Highlight a thread and press enter to view it. You'll notice that all
messages in the thread are displayed together, layed out graphically
by their relationship to each other (replies are nested under
parents). By default, only the new messages in a thread are expanded,
and the others are hidden. You can toggle an individual message's
state by highlighting a green line and pressing enter. You can use 'E'
to expand or collapse all messages or 'N' to expand only the new
messages. You'll also notice that Sup hides quoted text and
signatures. If you highlight a particular hidden chunk, you can press
enter to expand it, or you can press 'o' to toggle every hidden chunk
in a particular message. (Don't worry about remembering all these
things---you can hit '?' to see the full list of keyboard commands at
any point.)

A few other useful commands while viewing a thread. Press 'd' to
toggle a detailed header fpr a message. If you've scrolled too far to
the right, press '[' to jump all the way to the left. Finally, you can
press 'n' and 'p' to jump forward and backward between open
messages. (I find that very useful!)

Now press 'x' to kill the thread view buffer. You should see the inbox
again. If you don't, you can cycle through the buffers by pressing
'b', or you can press 'A' to see a list of all buffers and simply
select the inbox.

There are many operations you can perform on threads beyond viewing
them. To archive a thread, press 'a'. The thread will disappear from
your inbox, but will still appear in search results. If someone
replies an archived thread, it will reappear in your inbox. To kill a
thread, press '&'. Killed threads will never come back to your inbox,
even if people reply, but will still be searchable. (This is useful
for those interminable threads that you really have no interest in,
but which seem to pop up on every mailing list.)

If a thread is spam, press 'S'. It will disappear and won't come
back. It won't even appear in search results (unless you explicitly
search for spam.)

You can also star a thread by pressing '*'. Starred threads are
displayed with a little yellow asterix next to them, but otherwise
have no special semantics. (But you can also search for them
easily---we'll see how in a moment).

To edit the labels for (all the messages in) a thread, press 'l'. Type
in the labels as a sequence of space-separated words. To cancel the
input, press Ctrl-G.

Many of these operations can be applied to a group of threads. Press
't' to tag a thread. Tag a couple, then press ';' to apply the next
command to the set of threads. ';t', of course, will untag all tagged
messages.

Ok, let's try using labels and search. Press 'L' to bring up a list of
all the labels you've ever used, along with some special labels
(Draft, Starred, Sent, Spam, etc.). Highlight a label and press enter
to view all the messages with that label.

What you just did was actually a specific search. For a general
search, press "/". Now type in your query (again, Ctrl-G to cancel at
any point.) You can just type in arbitrary text, which will be matched
on a per-word basis against the bodies of all email in the index, or
you can make use of the full Ferret query syntax:

- Phrasal queries using double-quotes, e.g.: "three contiguous words"
- Queries against a particular field using <field name>:<query>,
  e.g.: label:ruby-talk, or from:matz@ruby-lang.org. (Fields include:
  body, from, to, and subject.)
- Force occurrence and non-occurrence using + and -, e.g. +label:spam,
  or -body:"hot soup"

You can combine those all together. For example:
     +label:ruby-talk +subject:\[ANN\] -rails

Play around with the search, and see the Ferret documentation for
details on more sophisticated queries (date ranges, "within n words",
etc.)

At this point, you're well on your way to figuring out all the cool
things Sup can do. By repeated applications of the '?' key, see if you
can figure out how to:
 - List some recent contacts
 - Easily search for all mail from a recent contact
 - Easily search for all mail from several recent contacts!
 - Add someone to your address book
 - Postpone a message (i.e., save a draft)
 - Quickly re-edit a just-saved draft message
 - View the raw header of a message
 - Star an individual message, not just a thread

There's one last thing to be aware of when using Sup: how it interacts
with other email programs. Sup stores data about messages in the
index---information necessary for searching, and message state---but
doesn't duplicate the message contents themselves. The messages remain
on the source. If the index and the source every fall out of sync,
e.g. due to another email client modifying the source, then Sup will
be unable to operate on that source.

For example, for mbox files, Sup stores a byte offset into the file
for each message. If a message deleted from that file by another
client, or even marked as read (yeah, mbox sucks), all succeeding
offsets will be wrong.

That's the bad news. The good news is that Sup is fairly good at being
able to detect this type of situation, and fixing it is just a matter
of running sup-import --rebuild on the source. Sup will even tell you
how to invoke sup-import when it detects a problem. This is a
complication you will almost certainly run in to if you use both Sup
and another MUA on the same source, so it's good to be aware of it.

Have fun, and let me know if you have any problems. --William