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+---
+postid: 00a
+title: Conversation view in Mutt
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+date: August 18, 2013
+tags: tech
+---
+
+My current `.muttrc` bases itself upon a plethora of web articles that touch
+this subject. I won't link any of them here, they are simply too many. Needless
+to say, a simple search on Mutt will send you down the path of proper
+configuration of this wonderful e-mail client, either through the official
+documentation or third-party sources such as this post.
+
+One feature which made Gmail such a popular application and hindered my
+migration to Mutt a few years ago, was the so-called "conversation view", i.e.
+the ability to group mail-reply sequences into single linear threads. Mutt has
+in fact a better feature called "threaded view". It is better in that it
+organizes a given discussion as a tree, which gives the user a much clearer
+view on who responded to whom, unlike Gmail, which, as I said, only has linear
+threads.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+To enable threads in Mutt, one must insert the following line in `.muttrc`:
+
+~~~~
+set sort = 'threads'
+~~~~
+
+or
+
+~~~~
+set sort = 'reverse-threads'
+~~~~
+
+to make it resemble Gmail's most-recent-first order.
+
+Since threading is enabled, sorting is now done on two levels: one within the
+thread, and the other between threads. The `sort_aux` option controls how
+sorting is done between discussions and is documented [in the manual][1].
+Basically, to obtain something very similar to Gmail, I use:
+
+~~~~
+set sort = 'threads'
+set sort_aux = 'reverse-last-date-received'
+~~~~
+
+However, conversations still aren't *that* clearly delimited. Mutt still
+displays all the mails in the folder, which is a real nightmare for heavy
+inboxes[^1]. And we can't, as far as I know, "squeeze" e-mails into a single
+conversation that shows as an item in the inbox. What we can do, however, is
+filter all the e-mails in a conversation using the `limit` function. What we
+want to do is make Mutt show us only the current conversation in the index and
+pager modes.
+
+The following set of steps describes a simple, yet time-consuming way to
+achieve this:
+
+1. Tag all the mails in the current conversation: `esc` followed by `t`
+2. [Apply][2] `limit` to tagged mails: `;` followed by `l`
+3. Limit to [tagged][3] e-mails: `~T` followed by `enter`
+4. Untag all the mails in the current conversation: `esc` followed by `t`
+
+The filter can be reset in a similar manner:
+
+1. Apply `limit`: `l`
+2. Limit to all e-mails: `all` followed by `enter`
+
+Unfortunately, these steps can be a hassle to apply even for experimented
+users, since they really are time consuming, although not too hard to
+memorize.  Fortunately, Mutt can be extended through macros, which were
+designed specifically for repetitive actions. Thus by pasting the following two
+lines in `.muttrc`:
+
+~~~~
+macro index,pager ut <tag-thread><limit>~T<enter><tag-thread> "show only current thread"
+macro index,pager ua <limit>all<enter> "show everything"
+~~~~
+
+we can run the two commands by pressing `u` followed by `t` and `u` followed by
+`a` respectively. I've chosen `u` as a prefix key since it's not used for any
+default actions. Feel free to suggest a more meaningful combination.
+
+Now Mutt is one step closer to the Gmail interface, while remaining more
+responsive and less memory-consuming, not to mention the CLI/TUI minimalistic
+awesomeness.
+
+[^1]: I don't know why anyone would keep more than 50 mails in the inbox, but
+it's happened to me. There are times when writing e-mails is so much more
+pressing than managing them, and that's when the inbox suddenly starts
+gathering 100+ messages. Folders and automatic filtering help prioritize, but
+for some reason Mutt doesn't encourage using folders. I've been using
+mutt-patched for quite some time now and still haven't managed to use them
+properly.
+
+[1]: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-6.html#sort_aux
+[2]: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-6.html#ss6.4
+[3]: http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html#ss4.2