No, XBuffy has nothing to do with the Vampire Slayer--it's simply a version of xbiff that is good for handling multiple mailboxes. For those with an interest in Buffy the Slayer, you can check out my Buffy quote generator.

Although it may be obvious from the name, XBuffy only runs when X is running. It's one of those little programs that I didn't think I needed, but once I discovered it, wondered how I managed without it.

1). Do you have xbuffy

The chances are that you don't have xbuffy, though xbiff (her boyfriend?) seems to be included with an installation of fluxbox. If you do have it, then go to step 3, otherwise, go to step 2.

2.) Getting and Installing XBuffy

In Gentoo Linux, it isn't yet in portage at time of writing. However, you can get it here.. The link given is correct at time of writing, if you have no luck, then just do a search on google for XBuffy. To install in Gentoo, you will, at least for the make install portion, need to be root or have root privileges. The version given is correct as of September 2002 but may, of course, change.

Apparently, it's so old that it wouldn't compile in Fedora 12. (I'm not a programmer though, so this might be easy for a programmer to fix.)

Recently, I've found that on Fedora and CentOS, the two systems I use most these days, neither xbuffy nor gbuffy are in the repos. On a recent install of Fedora 12, I found that the easiest way to do it was simply install it in Ubuntu (which does still have it), then use alien to make an rpm.

With the changes in Linux and the prevalence of bloated GUI email clients, I suppose the need for it, at least in the desktop type, Windows wannabe distributions, has greatly lessened. However, for those of us who still use mutt, it's still an extremely useful little application.

3.) Configuring XBuffy

(I am using the typical "Mail" for the mail directory--if you're using the Maildir format, it might be .maildir or Maildir instead. )

On occasion, I've had this not work properly. If, upon opening XBuffy, you get a small square with a 0 in it, rather than something listing your mailboxes, then change the ~ to the full path to the mailbox. For instance, if your user name is john, then instead of

Change it to read

The other possible fix (and once I needed to do both) is to specify the boxfile on the command line. So, on the installation where it wasn't working properly, I had this in my .xinitrc

Again, if you still only get a little box with a 0 in it, then shrug and use the -boxfile option when calling Xbuffy, either from command line or in your .xinitrc

If that doesn't work, then you might need the shortnames option. Call xbuffy (again, either from .xinitrc or command line) with

4.) Testing XBuffy

It should within a minute or so, give a beep and show that there is 1 message in your Personal mailbox. If you click on the title box marked personal, it should also show you who it's from (yourself in this case.)

One thing that I found to sometimes happen in FreeBSD, though not in Linux is that when mail arrived separate boxes would pop up listing the headers. If one gets a lot of mail, this can be a nuisance. If it does happen, it can be turned off. I call xbuffy from my .xinitrc so it starts when X starts. I added the option -header 0 (which refers to the length of time the header would show to it so it looks like

Congratulations, you're done. You now have XBuffy up and running properly. How you use it depends upon your situation. You can put it in your .xinitrc to start when you start X, or simply call it from a command line when you want it.

I put it in my .xinitrc with some of the options that I've covered. One can change its colors as well--for example, to have it with a black background and blue foreground you could call it with

xbuffy -fg blue -bg black

The man page lists various options that you can use with it. For example if I add the line to my .xbuffy file

under the

I can then click the middle mouse button on the listing for that mailbox. It will then open mutt to that mailbox.

There are a variety of other settings that can be configured. See the man page for details. There's also a good explanation of some of the options at Brandon Long's page.

I haven't checked this very deeply--Mr. Long's version is what's in FreeBSD ports and the tarball that I link to above is from his page. I didn't get sound working doing it the way the man page seems to indicate (which could easily be my error--it seemed as if one should use an option of -acmd blah blah). I get sound working by adding the following line to any mailbox in my .xbuffy file.

XBuffy is definitely a handy tool.