[ANN] New awesome vim plug-in using Ruby bindings

[Felipe Contreras]

Hi,

I've never been particularly happy with the code of the vim plug-in,
but it sort of did the job, after some fixes, and has been working
great so far for most of my needs even though it's clearly very rough
on the edges.

However, I'm recently in need of been able to read HTML mails, and
just trying to add that code was a nightmare, so I decided to look for
alternatives, including Anton's Python vim plug-in (which is nice, but
doesn't have support for that), and even learning emacs, to use what
most people here use (but it turns out the HTML messages don't work
correctly there either). I also tried the various mutt+notmuch
options, and none fit the bill.

So, since I'm a big fan of Ruby, I decided to try my luck writing a
plug-in from scratch. It took me one weekend, but I'm pretty happy
with the result. This plug-in has already essentially all the
functionality of the current one, but it's much, *much* simpler (only
600) lines of code.

And in addition has many more features:

 * Gradual searches; you don't have to wait for the whole search to finish,
   sort of like the 'less' command
 * Proper multi-part handling; finds out if there's text/plain, or if
   text/html, converts it using elinks
 * Extract all attachments
 * Open message with mutt (or any external application that can open an mbox)
 * More proper UTF-8 handling
 * Configurable key mappings
 * Much simpler, cleaner, beautiful, and extensible code (only 600 lines!)

I just added support to reply mails today, and after trying a bit I
got complaints from the vger.kernel.org server, but people using mutt
have had the same complaint, so I don't know, I wouldn't reply totally
on that. *But* you can open the mail with mutt, or any other client
that you want, as a fall-back option (the command to run is
configurable).

Sure, it depends on the Ruby bindings from notmuch (but those are easy
to compile), and on the 'mail' library from Ruby (easy to install),
but it makes things much, *much* easier. There might be ways to make
certain dependencies optional, and make this, and the current plug-in
converge somehow (maybe even the python one too), but for now I don't
see any reason to look back.

I can't wait to start using it for real :)

Enjoy ;)

https://github.com/felipec/notmuch-vim-ruby

P.S. I CC'ed a bunch of people that have showed interest in the vim
interface, I hope you don't mind

-- 
Felipe Contreras