I know, it’s a bold assertion. But, please, bear with me: as a longtime Unix-head, I need a tool that allows me to zoom through my emails rather than click-glance-click-glance-click-yawn-right-click-delete, etc.

For years I’ve been happy with Mutt because nothing compares with using the arrow keys to navigate through my emails, ALT-O to open a folder, SHIFT-O-R to do a reverse-sort, M for a new message, etc.
That, and using Visor, give me the comfort of a HUD-based email management tool whose speed is quite unbeatable.

Unfortunately, with today’s evolution of mail, everything is more or less HTML-based, which really doesn’t work well with Mutt — even using V to open in a text-based browser isn’t that good. If I ask Mutt to open a full-fledged browser instead, there goes the speed advantage…

So, I have reluctantly moved to a pure Google Mail solution and my experience has been positive so far: I run GMail as a standalone program using Fluid — on another platform I would use Prism — and I can keep using keyboard shortcuts for all my tasks!

If you wish to give it a try, start with only this subset of GMail’s keyboard shortcuts: JKEX#[ENTER]U are all you need to replicate 99% of your Mutt experience…

K/J: cursor up/down
X: select message
E: archive messages
#: delete messages
ENTER: read message
U: back to messages list