getting things done with mutt 3 (action counter)

Here's a short tip for putting a reminder on your desktop wallpaper of how many next-action and waiting-for messages you have. The result looks like this:

ACTION:  4
WAITING: 1

The approach is to combine a small shell script with the wonderful GeekTool program for MacOS X (similar programs exist for Linux, I'm sure). GeekTool lets you display arbitrary text, say console text on your Desktop. One of my GeekTool windows is set to run the script and display its results with a big red font.

The shell script is pretty dumb; it just counts the number of files in my Maildir directory. I guess if you're using the mbox format, you'll have to find some other way to count messages. Count the number of instances of '^From: ', maybe?

#!/bin/sh

# $2 is just for padding
function count_messages (){
  echo -n "$1:$2"; ls -1 ${HOME}/Mail/current/$1/cur | wc -l
}

count_messages ACTION " "
count_messages WAITING

I'm not expecting this to have a huge impact on my productivity, but maybe this will be that extra little bit that counts.

Edit 2007-10-25Fixed counting to account for empty boxes. Zero. We like that number.