wangp

bower

Mercury2018–2024

wangp / bower

bower

A curses terminal client for the Notmuch email system

Command Line Communication & Social

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7Distinct people

9Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

144GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A curses terminal client for the Notmuch email system

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

If you are using Notmuch, I recommend trying bower[1]. It is a TUI for interacting with notmuch, and can even be configured to do so over ssh, so that e.g. opening attachments…

aidenn0 used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-10-05 23:01:09 UTC to 2024-08-22 19:10:49 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	6
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

9 sources

aidenn0·Aug 22, 2024Recommendation phrase

If you are using Notmuch, I recommend trying bower[1]. It is a TUI for interacting with notmuch, and can even be configured to do so over ssh, so that e.g. opening attachments can happen on your local machine, even if your notmuch db is on a different computer. 1: https://github.com/wangp/bower

In Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

Karrot_Kream·Dec 31, 2022

Has anyone used Mercury? The language seems quite interesting and has C and C++ FFI. I see bower (https://github.com/wangp/bower/) a notmuch client is written in it.

In Prolog at Work

aidenn0·Nov 12, 2022Recommendation phrase

I use bower for my regular email client. It can connect to a remote machine with notmuch over ssh. It's fairly sparse on the features, but I love it. As a bonus, it's written in a fairly niche programming language: mercury, which is a strongly typed prolog dialect. 1: https://github.com/wangp/bower

In Notmuch – Just an email system

pabs3·Oct 12, 2022

Is this the right repo for bower? https://github.com/wangp/bower

In Aerc – a pretty good (terminal) email client

contingencies·May 4, 2022

https://neomutt.org/ https://meli.delivery/ https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup https://notmuchmail.org/ https://github.com/pazz/alot https://aerc-mail.org/ https://github.com/wangp/bower https://alpine.x10host.com/

In SnappyMail – Modern, lightweight and fast web-based email client

forgotpwd16·Apr 30, 2022

A relatively old language (having started in mid 90s) that is a mix of Prolog and Haskell. As code example someone can check the source code of bower (https://github.com/wangp/bower/tree/master/src), a curses client for notmuch mail system. Checking the homepage a new version was recently released which finalized the Linux ARM64 port (as well as other additions/fixes).

In Mercury Programming Language

rvense·Feb 12, 2022

I use offlineimap with bower[0], it works well. [0] https://github.com/wangp/bower

In Mutt 2.2.0

seifferth·Nov 24, 2021

While I don't know of any imap to git sync tool specifically, there are tons of tools for storing email locally in plain text and for keeping these local email stores in sync with imap servers. The most common local email store formats seem to be mbox[1] and maildir[2]. Mbox stores one "folder" of emails per file, while maildir stores one email per file, which does seem to be the more modern approach (exceeding your file quota does not seem to be a particularly urgent problem anymore). I personally use mbsync[3] to pull my email into a local maildir. I also use notmuch[4] and a nice tui[5] to search, read and write it. Note that filenames in maildir are unique, but provide little value beyond that. Some emails are also encoded in ways that will hide content from grep and friends (base64 being among the most popular ones). This makes notmu

Read the rest

ch especially valuable, as it abstracts all those encoding issues away and provides an amazing search interface. I do not use a git repository for email myself, yet since a maildir is just a directory tree of plain text files, storing it in a repo is a no-brainer: mbsync -a # Configured via dotfiles cd my_local_maildir git add . git commit [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir [3]: https://isync.sourceforge.io/ [4]: https://notmuchmail.org/ [5]: https://github.com/wangp/bower

In Ask HN: Is There an IMAP2Git?

aidenn0·Oct 5, 2018

I'm really happy with my e-mail setup of offlineimap, afew, notmuch, bower. http://www.offlineimap.org/ https://github.com/afewmail/afew https://github.com/wangp/bower

In Guide to email in Emacs using mu and mu4e