Linking notes and email messages

A few days ago, I've cobbled together a note-taking solution for my email messages. It's very unixy, consisting of a fair number of different parts working together: Claws Mail with the Python plugin and two of the shipped example scripts on the one side, Tomboy with the Claws Mail addin and the Reminder addin on the other side.

Starting with a message selection in Claws Mail,

a click on the "Create Tomboy Note" menu item of the Python example script results in this dialog popping up (I know that this dialog is ultra-ugly, but hey, it's a quick&dirty easy-code example script, nothing more)

which in turn creates this Tomboy note

The Tomboy reminder plugin will take care to remind me about this next monday by raising the note.

To make the round-trip complete, there's a second example script that raises all Tomboy notes that link to a selected message.

Okay, admittedly not the end-user friendliest setup, but it suits my needs pretty well. And it shows the benefits of scripting language interfaces for glueing components together -- it didn't take long to write the scripts to make this work, even though the plugins and addins have not especially been designed for it.

Extending and Automating Claws Mail - the sneaky way

The recent release of Claws Mail 3.7.4 has also seen a much more powerful version of the Python plugin. It is now possible to write scripts that are executed automatically on startup, shutdown, or opening of a compose window. It's also now possible to write scripts that work on an already opened compose window. The user interface got better as well (e.g. it's now possible to trigger scripts via toolbar buttons).

However, what the latest release still lacks, is documentation and examples. After all, features that are not documented don't exist. This is supposed to get better in the next release. I've started adding a few example scripts to the source distribution that show possible solutions to questions that have been raised on the user's mailing list lately. Most of these should already work with the released version of the plugin, with the exception of the startup script that show's how to add new menu items for custom actions into the main window (the examples being a menu item to mark a thread as read, and to add a menu item to create and show the Python plugin's API documentation on-the-fly - isn't introspection cool?).

Anyways, if anybody scripted something cool with the plugin, please consider sending the (well commented) script to me. I'd be happy to consider it for inclusion in the distributed examples.

Claws Mail got bitten by a Snake!

I've been successfully using the Perl plugin for Claws Mail for a long time now. It hasn't seen many updates lately, but that's because I am mostly happy with it for my personal needs.

However, filters for Claws Mail is one of the few remaining areas where I'm still a Perl user. I have the feeling that my mental capabilities are insufficient for memorizing the dozens (hundreds?) of operators, magic variables etc., especially after a while of absense from the language. "There is more than one way to do it" is fine, but with age, I tend to prefer "There is a single (obvious) way to do it" as a motto. So, for all of my scripting purposes, I found a new home at the Python people. Please, no discussion which one is "better", for whatever definition of "better". Both are nice languages, and I guess people just have to figure out which one suits their individual work flow better.

So, lately, I had to embed a Python interpreter in some C code, and, as often when learning about new technologies, I though this might be a fun add-on to Claws Mail. Don't worry, I am not trying to bloat Claws Mail with every single interpreter out there -- although that might actually be a fun experience.

So I cooked up a small Python plugin for Claws Mail, which adds an interactive Python console to Claws Mail (stolen and adapted from gtkparasite - which is a great project). It's also possible to execute scripts from the menu, for further automation. The interface to Claws Mail is still limited, and only includes calling menu items for now.



(Planet readers: A short demo screencast is here).

Code is on GitHub.

PS: Yes, I know that the name Python actually refers to a commedy group, not to the animal. But I don't care.

Update: The plugin source moved to Claws Mail CVS. It also gained on a new trick on the way -- automated composing of mail messages. See the README file for an example.