vib - view in browser

A minimalistic tool for the aerc e-mail client that displays messages piped from aerc in your favourite browser.

After contemplating writing a shell script for this purpose, I figured it would only take a little longer to write it in zig, allowing me to share shell-agnostic statically linked binaries. Just in case you're wondering 😊.

Contributing

There's a mailing list to send patches to, discuss, etc. If you're used to GitHub's pull-request workflow, check out this page to see how to send me pull-requests or maybe even better-suited alternatives (patch-sets).

Getting it

You can download vib from its refs page. Pick the latest version, e.g. v0.1.0, then download the executable for your operating system.

Binary downloads are named with the following postfixes:

--aarch64-macos.gz : for macOS ARM (e.g. M1)
--aarch64-x86_64-linux.gz : for Linux
--aarch64-x86_64-macos.gz : for Intel Macs
--aarch64-x86_64-windows.exe.zip : for Windows

After downloading, extract the .gz files like this:

gunzip vib-v0.1.0--x86_64-linux.gz

Note: You might want to rename the executable to vib (without the version and platform information), or create an vib symlink for it.

On Windows, right-click on the .zip file and choose "Extract all..." from the context menu. After that, you may want to right-click and rename the extracted file to vib.exe.

Usage

After downloading or building it, and making sure the vib command is in your PATH, configure aerc to use vib:

In your aerc's binds.conf, place your preferred shortcut in the [view] section like this:

[view]

# ... existing stuff ...

# on B, pipe the message part to vib
B = :pipe -b -p vib -e sensible-browser -c<Enter>

If vib is not in your path, you may optionally specify the full path to vib like so:

B = :pipe -b -p /home/rs/vib -e sensible-browser -c<Enter>

When you open a message now, and select its HTML part, you can view it in the browser by pressing B.

Vib reads the message (part) piped to it from aerc, dumps it into a temporary file, and launches a browser.

Options are:
  -e, --exec     : optional name of the executable (browser) to launch
  -p, --prefix   : optional prefix for temp file names. Default: vib-
  -t, --tmpdir   : temp dir to write to. Default: /tmp
  -o, --output   : optional path to write to instead of temp file
  -c, --cleanup  : delete all of vib's temp files before creating a new one

Examples:
vib -e sensible-browser
  Launch the sensible-browser, use defaults for all options.

vib -e firefox -c -t /tmp/vib-messages
  Delete vib's temp files from previous runs, then create a new one
  and launch firefox with the piped-in message.

vib -o /tmp/current-message.html
  Launch no browser, just write to /tmp/current-message.html
  This allows you to leave the browser open on the same page,
  while using vib to refresh the content.

Building it

Make sure you have the latest stable release of zig, zig 0.10.0 installed. Then run:

zig build

This will produce vib in the ./zig-out/bin/ directory. From there, copy it to a directory in your PATH, e.g. in my case: ~/bin.

Tested with