Today, Best Practical announced IMAP access to Hiveminder. It's way cool, and I'm sure I'll end up making a lot of improvement to my mutt configuration tools to make the most of it. You can check out their blog post or documentation for more information, but basically you point your IMAP client at Hiveminder and you can see your todo list. You can drop new tasks (in the form of email from elsewhere) into inbound folders and you can move existing tasks into other folders to cause them to become hidden or complete. There's a bit more to it, but that's the gist.
My IMAP client of choice is OfflineIMAP, as I've said many times before. It's the easiest way for me to use mutt with IMAP, whether online or off. Unfortunately, it has a really stupid bug. Every message in an IMAP account has a unique id (the UID), which is useful for doing synchronization. It lets you figure out that you've moved a message from one place to another in your offline store. OfflineIMAP doesn't seem to keep the same UID on messages that have moved from one folder to another, which made it impossible to use the IMAP interface to mark a message done or hidden.
As usual, the guys at Hiveminder were quick to sort this out, making their correct software cope with my twitchy software.
Now, the folders in which Hiveminder presents your tasks are (I am told) great for users of GUI MUAs, where they form a nice hierarchy of folders that you can drill down through. Here's a summary of the folder layout:
Actions
Completed
Hide for
Days..
01 day
(..more..)
Months..
01 month
(..more..)
Take
Braindump mailboxes
[]
Groups
pep
All tasks
Everyone else's tasks
Up for grabs
Help
News
Here's what they look like as directories:
Actions/Completed Actions/Hide for/Days../01 day Actions/Hide for/Months../01 month Actions/Take Braindump mailboxes/[] Groups/pep Groups/pep/All tasks Groups/pep/Everyone else's tasks Groups/pep/Up for grabs Help News
The amount of typing needed to move things around between these folders is a drag. Fortunately, OfflineIMAP makes it really simple to map Hiveminder's IMAP folders into a nice, shallow, easy to type hierarchy. With my OfflineIMAP configuration, it looks like this:
./braindump ./braindump.[] ./done ./groups ./groups.pep ./groups.pep.all ./groups.pep.avail ./groups.pep.others ./help ./hide.1d ./hide.1m ./inbox ./take
I need to do a bit of work to make
WhichConfig check $0 (or
something) to notice that I want to use Hiveminder, rather than the "normal"
mail available to it. Even without having done that, the IMAP interface is
pretty fantastic. I see a lot of weird Maildir tricks in my future. Until I
have some to publish, here's my OfflineIMAP configuration for use with
Hiveminder:
.offlineimap:
[general] pythonfile = ~/.offlineimap/helper.py [Account hiveminder] localrepository = hiveminder_maildir remoterepository = hiveminder_imap [Repository hiveminder_imap] type = IMAP remotehost = hiveminder.com ssl = yes remoteuser = user@example.com remotepass = PASSWORD nametrans = lambda foldername: hm_nametrans(foldername) folderfilter = lambda foldername: hm_folderfilter(foldername) [Repository hiveminder_maildir] type = Maildir localfolders = ~/Mailhive
This relies on a few Python functions stored in another file:
helper.py:
import re
hide_re = re.compile('^Actions/Hide')
spec_re = re.compile('(?P\d\d) (?Pdays?|months?)$')
def hm_folderfilter(folder):
if folder in ('Actions', 'Groups'): return False
if hide_re.search(folder) and not spec_re.search(folder): return False
return True
def hm_nametrans(folder):
if folder == 'Actions/Completed': return 'done'
if folder == 'Actions/Take': return 'take'
if folder == 'Actions/Take': return 'take'
folder = re.compile('Braindump mailboxes').sub('braindump', folder)
if hide_re.search(folder):
spec = spec_re.search(folder)
n = int(spec.group('n'))
units = spec.group('units')
return 'hide/%s%s' % (n, units[0:1])
if re.compile('^Groups').search(folder):
folder = re.compile('All tasks').sub('all', folder)
folder = re.compile('Up for grabs').sub('avail', folder)
folder = re.compile("Everyone else's tasks").sub('others', folder)
return folder.lower()