After just being acquainted with mutt (My fear of mutt, and why it was all for NULL) I forgot that I hate remembering things. I have too many things to remember already by using linux; why would I want to start having to remembering people’s names and email addresses on top of all that unix/linux sysadmin knowledge?

Well instead of hacking together some halfassed solution by exporting a csv of my google contacts, and parsing, and gobblygook; I did a quick search and found that there’s a program called goobook (Homepage) Also, and a little down the page is a neato description on how to use it with mutt.

After installing goobook (yaourt -S goobook-git) I configured it by making a new file ~/.netrc

machine google.com
login me@gmail.com
password my_password_here

I then tested it out to make sure it’s working:

# Enjoy all your contacts being dumped to stdout
goobook dump_contacts

As long as something outputted then you should be golden, otherwise enjoy troubleshooting; there’s not that much you could have done wrong up until this point

Now that you have goobook working, lets integrate it into mutt:

# Add the following to your ~/.mutt/muttrc

# Goobook query (google contacts)
set query_command="goobook query '%s'"
bind editor \t complete-query ## tab completion for contacts  

# Add contacts to google
macro index,pager a "goobook add" "add the sender address to Google contacts"

# Reload goobook db
macro index,pager gr "!goobook reload\n" "Goobook reload"

Now all you have to do is reload mutt, and enjoy your spoils:

• To search just start an email; and hit your tab key to query the contact database
• To add a new contact for an email you’re reading/have selected just press the letter a
• To reload the goobook database (say you added a contact with your phone, or online); just hit gr in sequence; and enjoy a fresh and up to date goobook database.

On a side note, I seem to be migrating deeper into cli apps, and ditching the gui counterparts. Even though I have a killer computer with a bunch of ram;  I figure the cpu cycles can be better spent on something else. And at best case scenario, it might save some of my precious battery life. Expect some more posts I guess about all the new cli things that I’ve setup.