Anyone who’s been reading Irreal for a while knows that I’m a huge fan of Mu/Mu4e for dealing with my email. It has just the right features for my preferred workflow. That includes it’s robust search capabilities that allow me to store all my emails in a single repository and find them easily. That saves me a lot of time and mental cycles trying to decide where to store saved emails: they all go to the same place.
Another thing I like about mu4e is that it’s text based. Who, after all, wants their emails running arbitrary Javascript? Most people apparently. The majority of the email I get that’s not from fellow nerds is HTML based and often includes some sort of Javascript. I hate this but I deal with it very successfully by using the built-in view-in-xwidget command so that I can read HTML emails as they were composed (complete with the Javascript).
Hong Xu has a nice post that shows us how to move in the other direction. Mu4e will try—with various degrees of success—to display HTML by default but it doesn’t use XWidgets and the results are often less than optimal. Xu’s post describes how to make mu4e switch between HTML and plain text display for those occasions when the HTML display is distracting.
The change is simply the setting of a keymap entry for the mu4e-view-mode-map so it’s easy to add to your configuration without a lot of bother. Xu’s change along with compiling in the XWidget support gives you fine control over the way an email is displayed.