An unobtrusive email monitor for mu4e on the Mac

This is not exactly an Emacs post, but some users of the mighty mu4e might find it useful. I don’t like big alerts to new emails that distract me from what I am doing, but I also don’t want to keep switching to my mu4e buffer to see if new emails have arrived. My solution is to have a small notification item in my Mac status bar to tell me how many emails I have.

It looks like this (the bit underlined in red):

The text @ 1/3/0/0 tells me that I have, respectively,

• 1 unread email in my inbox.
• 3 total emails in my inbox (i.e. 3 too many!).
• 0 emails in my drafts folder. This is useful to keep an eye on in case I save a draft and then forget about it.
• 0 emails in my outbox. This is my postfix email outbox and is useful to keep an eye on in case emails sent when I’m offline don’t get automatically sent when I reconnect.

To set this up I use shellwrangler which is a small app that embeds the output of a script in the status bar. Update 2017-11-10 shellwrangler appears dead and bitbar looks like a superior alternative. This then calls the following perl script which generates the text. Shellwrangler Bitbar updates at a specified interval so that is all there is to it.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

###########################################################################
#
# Count number of emails in inbox, drafts and outbox for mail indexed
# with mu and sent with sendmail or equivalent
#
# by Ben Maughan
# http://www.pragmaticemacs.com
#
# Feel free to distribute, modify, whatever
#
###########################################################################

## total mails in inbox
chomp(my @tot=`/usr/local/bin/mu find maildir:/work/INBOX 2>/dev/null`);
## unread mails in inbox
chomp(my @unread=`/usr/local/bin/mu find maildir:/work/INBOX AND flag:unread 2>/dev/null`);
## drafts
chomp(my @drafts=`/usr/local/bin/mu find maildir:/work/[Gmail].Drafts 2>/dev/null`);

## number in outbox
chomp(my @mailq=`/usr/bin/mailq`);
my @outbox = grep /^[0-9A-F]{12}/, @mailq;

printf "@ %d/%d/%d/%d",$#unread+1,$#tot+1,$#drafts+1,$#outbox+1;

exit;

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Reformatting Tabular Data

Sometimes in my research I need to extract tabular data from a pdf paper. I can copy and paste the table into an Emacs buffer but the data is generally not formatted in a usable way. Luckily Emacs has a wealth of tools to reformat this sort of data.

Here is an animated gif illustrating some tools I use to do this (of course there are lots of other ways to do the same thing).

In the animation I use the following tools

• C-x h to select the whole buffer.
• C-c | to run org-table-create-or-convert-from-region to convert the region to an org table. This doesn’t get me all the way to where I want to be, but I find it helpful to see the data clearly.
• M-S-<left> to delete some unwanted columns
• mc/mark-next-like-this from multiple cursors to give me a cursor on each line (I bind this to M-.)
• M-f to move forward by word
• shrink-whitespace to remove whitespace (I bind this to M-SPACE)
• C-c - to run org-table-insert-hline to add a nice horizontal line to my table

This restructures the data in the way I need, and I can now use org-table-export to export to other useful formats.

Save window layouts with ivy-view

The wonderful ivy library provides a command ivy-view which allows you to quickly bookmark the current arrangement of windows in your Emacs frame. The nice thing is that once you do this, the bookmarked arrangement then appears in your ivy-powered buffer switching list so changing back to the arrangement you had is as easy as switching buffers. This make a lightweight alternative to other mathods for managing window layouts.

To use this, just run ivy-push-view to store the current view, and optionally give it a name (a useful default we be offered). This will then be offered when you switch buffer using ivy-switch-buffer (which you are using automatically if you use ivy-mode). To make these ivy-views appear in your buffer list, you might need to set the option

(setq ivy-use-virtual-buffers t)

in you emacs config file.

Ivy author abo-abo gives an example on his blog post – take a look if this sounds useful.