Gmail contacts with Mutt « jorge’s stompbox

Gmail contacts with Mutt

January 28, 2009 by jcastro

I would like to just throw a shout out to the authors of the goobook python script – it’s the nicest gmail contact integration I’ve seen so far. The big killer feature is that it caches the results, so it’s fast and doesn’t get in the way. You’ll also want the example.py they have one the google page as an example to put your account information in. To use it in mutt put it some place and add it to your muttrc like so:

set query_command = “/home/jorge/contactos.py ‘%s’”

and then set some keybindings (I prefer tab to the default ctrl-t):

bind editor <Tab> complete-query
bind editor ^T complete

Now every time you hit tab it will autocomplete with your gmail contacts … Ctrl-T will query your local aliases if you have those. I prefer to keep everything in my gmail anyway so I don’t use that last one. Thanks to Kyle Rankin and Rick Harding helping find and configure this.

Posted in blog | Tagged gmail, mutt | 33 Comments

33 Responses

on January 28, 2009 at 6:17 pm | Reply etank

When I try to use goobook I get the following:

python Configs/mutt/contactos.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “Configs/mutt/contactos.py”, line 8, in
from gdata.contacts.service import ContactsService, ContactsQuery
ImportError: No module named contacts.service

I’m thinking that it could because the version of gdata in the ubuntu repo is 1.0.9 and the most recent version is 1.2.4. What did you do to get it to work.
on January 28, 2009 at 6:21 pm | Reply etank

Never mind. Turns out that I’m an idiot. I didn’t copy the ‘%s’ into my .muttrc.
on January 28, 2009 at 7:42 pm | Reply Shaun Dennie

Excellent tip. On hardy I had to search for the python gdata contacts module but, after that it works great in mutt.
on January 29, 2009 at 12:00 am | Reply nixternal

I have been using goobook for a while now, however I still think I prefer the Little Brother Data Base or just using the Mutt text based address book to add names manually. With LBDB, I can setup LDAP with a global address book and also use the Google address book, or any other address book that I may use. With my personal accounts I do use goobook most of the time.
- on March 26, 2009 at 12:54 pm | Reply B Grams
  
  I’m searching all over for details on setting up lbdb to check google contacts, and google isn’t coming through. Could you share something on your setup with lbdb and google contacts?
on January 29, 2009 at 6:20 am | Reply Christopher Lunsford

thanks for the link to this cool script I can’t wait to see more features in it
on January 29, 2009 at 7:56 am | Reply Michael

It turns out i’m a real idiot. Even when copy ‘%s’ into my .muttrc i still got the error:
File “Configs/mutt/contactos.py”, line 8, in
from gdata.contacts.service import ContactsService, ContactsQuery
ImportError: No module named contacts.service

I am sure i have installed the package python-gdata (1.0.9-1ubuntu1).
I’m using Ubuntu 8.10
I have also place the right settings in the file settings.py in my home directory
Any hints?
on February 1, 2009 at 10:38 am | Reply Sam

Maybe it’s just me, but when I tried to use it, it would always cut off the first result, so searches with only one return would be blank, I had to go in and edit the file, add a new line character right before line 27 (the for (k,v) statement). I believe its because Mutt strips the first line of query returns (which I read somewhere else a while ago) and so it was stripping the first result. Now it seems to work perfectly. Cool script!
on February 2, 2009 at 2:58 pm | Reply Nick August

Michael: you need to have the gdata python lib installed. download the latest version from: http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/downloads/list and you should be good to go.
on February 3, 2009 at 11:06 am | Reply Michael

@Nick August :
Thanks! It’s working now!
on March 13, 2009 at 1:09 pm | Reply trmentry

I have this installed and from command line I can query my contacts and get them just fine but when in Mutt and query an addy, I don’t get the return for an address I know is there when I hit tab.

Any ideas?
on April 27, 2009 at 1:44 pm | Reply Vivien Carodine

Wow! what an idea ! What a concept ! Beautiful .. Amazing
on May 27, 2009 at 9:58 pm | Reply abercrombie

my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with �we leave it to you to decide�.
on June 20, 2009 at 5:14 pm | Reply PPmarcel

Hello. I just want to check: does goobook send unencrypted password on the net, or does it use ssl somehow?
on June 22, 2009 at 10:57 am | Reply Olive

Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking you feeds also, Thanks.
on July 3, 2009 at 7:53 am | Reply Senthil

Thank you to you as well as the goobook developers.
on July 3, 2009 at 1:26 pm | Reply Susie

Thoughtful post and well written. Please write more on this if you have time.
on July 12, 2009 at 6:14 pm | Reply John

I guess I agree with you but maybe if you explained it just a little more I could learn more. Thanks in advance.
on July 19, 2009 at 5:13 pm | Reply Jordan

Anybody know if I wanted to bookmark your blog do I have to set-up an account for NewsVine?
on July 23, 2009 at 5:04 am | Reply Professional Teeth Whitening

Hello, I think this is the coollest wordpress powered blog I`ve seen. I really like your theme
on August 5, 2009 at 12:38 pm | Reply scott

noob question: i pasted
-set query_command = “/directory_path/contactos.py ‘%s’”-
into .muttrc, but get the following when i run mutt:
‘%s’”: unknown variable
what’s wrong?
also, where does the settings_example.py come into play?
some help would be appreciated.
many thanks!
on August 5, 2009 at 1:21 pm | Reply scott

hmm…was getting that error in gnome terminal, but not in rxvt. still a terminal noob (in both senses). ignore my above ??s
on August 8, 2009 at 11:13 am | Reply Vítor Márcio Paiva de Sousa Baptista (vitorbaptista) 's status on Saturday, 08-Aug-09 16:13:30 UTC - Identi.ca

[...] Ahh, agora sim… Mutt sincronizando os contatos com o Gmail http://castrojo.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/gmail-contacts-with-mutt/ [...]
on August 21, 2009 at 1:14 pm | Reply Samuel

@Scott,

You need to retype the double ” and single ‘ quotes in the setquery line to straight quotes, not the prettified curly quotes displayed on the blog page.
- on August 21, 2009 at 1:34 pm | Reply scott
  
  thanks for that!
on August 23, 2009 at 1:56 pm | Reply John

Great plugin!

bit i use imaps, does it fetch adress book through imap, or does anyone can sniff my login/password with a simple hub?
on September 28, 2009 at 11:05 am | Reply Ákos

This is just GREAT!
Thanks!
on October 14, 2009 at 8:17 am | Reply Björn

This script works nicely at home, I get all my contacts. However, at work I am behind a proxy. I tried to look at the gdata api docs, but I couldnt see any obvious place where I could set the proxy.
Does anyone know hot to do that?
thanks,
bjorn
- on October 21, 2009 at 2:21 am | Reply rcarson
  
  You should be able to add these to your .bashrc or .profile:
  
  export http_proxy=”:”
  export https_proxy=$http_proxy
  export ftp_proxy=$http_proxy
  export all_proxy=$http_proxy
  export no_proxy=”localhost, 127.0.0.1″
  
  it should should use these variables, but it may not.
on November 6, 2009 at 11:04 am | Reply hot cam

Cool site, nice content
on November 30, 2009 at 10:40 am | Reply lostar

Yeah! Thanks a lot!
on December 10, 2009 at 7:41 am | Reply Aaron Toponce

Jorge- This isn’t working for me, and there are no errors. Everything is in its place- contactos.py, settings.py and the Python Google library. Hitting the key does not complete any contacts, and ~/.goobook_cache does not get created unless I create it manually, at which point it does get filled with some random data, it seems, but no contacts. Not sure if there is a bug, or what, but no dice here.
- on December 10, 2009 at 7:43 am | Reply Aaron Toponce
  
  Cancel that. Moving everything into ~/.mutt/ works. Shrug. Very nice. Thanks.