I’ve been using mutt with offlineimap and msmtp for a while now, and I want to use this post to collect some features and tips that I’ve found myself often searching for.

Changing the filename of the PGP signature attachment

The default keybinding for searching the current folder is l. After you’ve entered search/limiting mode, you can use a wide variety of combinations of flags and regular expressions to match messages:

Note that limiting only matches the subject and the sender’s name by default.

~B Search the whole message, not only subject and sender’s name

See the official mutt documentation for a full list of available patterns.

A common thing to do is to tag/mark all messages meeting certain criterias. This is very easy to do in mutt using the tag-pattern function. By default, this function is bound to T (that’s shift+t). You can then use the same flags and regular expressions as you can when limiting messages.

tag-pattern only selects messages in the current folder/mailbox

After tagging messages, you’ll most likely want to do something with them. This is where the tag-prefix operator comes into play. This operator tells mutt to apply the next operation to all tagged messages. The default keybinding for tag-prefix is ; (semicolon).

Here’s an example of how to tag all unread messages and mark them as read:

T # Invokes the tag-pattern function
~N # Tags all unread messages
; # tag-prefix operator, next operation will be applied to all tagged messages
W # Clear flag
N # Clear the N (unread) flag

In the beginning I often found myself searching for how to untag messages. It can be done the same as you tag messages, except that you have to use CTRL instead of SHIFT: ^t <pattern>. To untag all messages, type ^t all.

Changing the PGP signature attachment’s filename

When using mutt with PGP, the default filename of the signature attachment is noname. Although this is a commonly used filename, I personally want it to be named signature.asc. To be able to do this, you’ll need to install mutt with the pgp-verbose-mime-patch. I’ve covered how to install mutt on Mac OS X with this patch in the post My mutt setup (dead link, coming soon).

After you’ve installed mutt with this patch, it’s very simple to change the signature attachment’s filename. All you have to do is add the following line to your .muttrc:

set pgp_mime_signature_filename = 'signature.asc'

I have different email addresses based on what “role” I have. One (with several aliases) is for personal stuff, one is for work related stuff and one is for my freelance company. I’d like mutt to change my signature based on which address I send the email from. This is also fairly easy to accomplish. Just add the following line to .muttrc for each account you would like a specific signature for:

send-hook "~f from@address1.com" 'set signature=~/.mutt/signature_for_address1'

This will tell mutt that “whenever I send a message from from@address1.com, use the signature in the file ~/.mutt/signature_for_address1”.

That’s it for now. I’ll continue to add useful mutt tips to this post.

Mutt tips & tricks

This is something I don’t do that often, and I always forget the correct syntax. Thus this post.

Let’s say you have a table images and a table users. Now you want to delete all rows in table images that are associated with rows in the table users that are marked as deleted.

First, I usually do a visual inspection of the rows that will be deleted:

SELECT i.* FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

The rows returned by this query are the rows that will be deleted when you run the following query:

DELETE i FROM images i LEFT JOIN users u ON i.user_id = u.id WHERE u.deleted = 1;

They key part here is to specify which table you want to delete from. In this case it’s the table i, which is the images table.

Deleting rows with a LEFT JOIN in MySQL

Disabling the password needed for sudo for a specific user is very easy in Ubuntu. This method applies to Ubuntu 16.04, but probably also other versions of Ubuntu and maybe even other distros.

Note: If this is the first time you’re running this command, you’ll most likely be presented with a list of editors to choose from. Choose the one you’re most comfortable with.

Then enter the following line at the end of the file:

Make sure to replace user with the username of the user you want to allow using sudo without entering a password.

Disabling password for sudo in Ubuntu

The Royal Norwegian Air Force practices formation flying every year in December. This year, they were schedule to fly over Bodø at 11:22 on December 8th. I managed to capture them with my zoom lens just a couple minutes after their scheduled arrival.

It wasn't the greatest light for photographing moving aircrafts, but I managed to get a couple of photos that turned out somewhat okay.

RNoAF Christmas Star 2022

I relatively recently posted about moving my website to WordPress. This actually still holds true, but I’ve given the website a new look and made some changes to the deployment routines.

Now I have a solid development focused foundation based on Trellis.

My website is my playground. This is where I can freely play with any new technologies that I come across and just have some fun. It’s important to me that some of the things I do on the computer is just for fun, and not only work related – there’s quite a lot of that.

My previous WordPress setup was just a Digital Ocean droplet created using their One-Click WordPress installation. This works fine if you just want a website up and running where you can add a theme and your favorite plugins and start typing. But it gets a bit trickier when you want to have a local development version of the site on your computer and a production version, and even maybe a staging version, running live on the internet.

This is where Trellis comes into play. It’s a ready-to-use setup based on Bedrock and Ansible and lots of other good stuff that makes it really simple to get up and running with three different environments:

The workflow for setting up a new site once you have Trellis installed is something along the lines of:

Do some small adjustments to a couple of configuration files for the hosts (servers) and the various environments

Create a git repository of your project and push it to ie. Github

And voilà! Your site is now deployed to the staging server. Of course, you must have set up a server somewhere to use as a staging server. The same goes for the production environment.

In addition to this, I use the WP DB Migrate Pro plugin(s) so that I can easily migrate my database and media files from one environment to another.

Website changes – again

I'm Kim, a full-stack web developer and entrepreneur based in Bodø, Norway. Currently occupied with running my own company, being a father and raising a little standard poodle.

Full-stack web developer, business owner and tech geek.

Mutt tips & tricks

Finding messages in the current folder

Common flags

Tagging messages

Untagging messages

Changing the PGP signature attachment’s filename

“From”-specific signatures