[GH-ISSUE #61] [Enhancement] More readable emails (colourised quoted text) #55

New issue

Closed

opened 2026-03-03 01:19:26 +03:00 by kerem · 2 comments

kerem commented

2026-03-03 01:19:26 +03:00

Owner

Originally created by @sc0ttj on GitHub (Nov 22, 2020).
Original GitHub issue: https://github.com/d99kris/nmail/issues/61

Originally assigned to: @d99kris on GitHub.

In aerc, one of the few things I liked about it was that is parsed the contents of emails, then colourised it:

the replied text (lines beginning with > ) is greyed out a bit
diffs (lines starting + or - ) are red and green

I don't care about the colored diffs so much, but it would be nice if nmail greyed out the replied text as bit (like editors do with comments) so that email with lots of replies and back n forths in them were a lot more readable at first glance.

Personally, I think it would be a nice enhancement over the alpine UI, while still in keeping with the simple nmail UI aesthetic - although I do understand this may be out of scope, and may well introduce extra complexity (users wanting to set a preferred colour, terminals not showing colours the same, etc, etc).

Originally created by @sc0ttj on GitHub (Nov 22, 2020). Original GitHub issue: https://github.com/d99kris/nmail/issues/61 Originally assigned to: @d99kris on GitHub. In aerc, one of the few things I liked about it was that is parsed the contents of emails, then colourised it: - the replied text (lines beginning with `> `) is greyed out a bit - diffs (lines starting `+ ` or `- `) are red and green I don't care about the colored diffs so much, but it would be nice if nmail greyed out the replied text as bit (like editors do with comments) so that email with lots of replies and back n forths in them were a lot more readable at first glance. Personally, I think it would be a nice enhancement over the alpine UI, while still in keeping with the simple nmail UI aesthetic - although I do understand this may be out of scope, and may well introduce extra complexity (users wanting to set a preferred colour, terminals not showing colours the same, etc, etc).

kerem closed this issue

2026-03-03 01:19:27 +03:00

kerem commented

2026-03-03 01:19:27 +03:00

Author

Owner

@d99kris commented on GitHub (Nov 23, 2020):

Hi @sc0ttj - thanks for the suggestion.

Yeah, I've been a bit reluctant to step away from the plain UI inspired by alpine / pine.

But the greyed out replied text is a neat idea, let me give it a try. Assuming it's easily implemented I think this feature would make sense.

@d99kris commented on GitHub (Nov 23, 2020): Hi @sc0ttj - thanks for the suggestion. Yeah, I've been a bit reluctant to step away from the plain UI inspired by alpine / pine. But the greyed out replied text is a neat idea, let me give it a try. Assuming it's easily implemented I think this feature would make sense.

kerem commented

2026-03-03 01:19:27 +03:00

Author

Owner

@d99kris commented on GitHub (Nov 28, 2020):

I've implemented basic support for grayed out quoted lines (lines starting with >). I "solved" the complexity by making it an optional feature disabled by default. To enable it, edit ~/.nmail/ui.conf and set:

colors_enabled=1

The functionality was tested OK in Ubuntu gnome-terminal and macOS Terminal.app.

I quickly tried in the default terminal in fossapup64 but it seems that terminal does not support setting user-specified (hex) colors. So the log file ~/.nmail/log.txt will have a warning:

terminal does not support changing colors

Not sure which terminal you are typically using?

If you encounter issues, please let me know, we can try add support for setting one of the 16 standard colors instead of only user-customized by hex.

@d99kris commented on GitHub (Nov 28, 2020): I've implemented basic support for grayed out quoted lines (lines starting with `>`). I "solved" the complexity by making it an optional feature disabled by default. To enable it, edit `~/.nmail/ui.conf` and set: ``` colors_enabled=1 ``` The functionality was tested OK in Ubuntu `gnome-terminal` and macOS `Terminal.app`. I quickly tried in the default terminal in fossapup64 but it seems that terminal does not support setting user-specified (hex) colors. So the log file `~/.nmail/log.txt` will have a warning: ``` terminal does not support changing colors ``` Not sure which terminal you are typically using? If you encounter issues, please let me know, we can try add support for setting one of the 16 standard colors instead of only user-customized by hex.