This section is intended as a brief overview of how to use Mutt. There are many other features which are described elsewhere in the manual. There is even more information available in the Mutt FAQ and various web pages. See the Mutt Page for more details.
The keybindings described in this section are the defaults as distributed. Your local system administrator may have altered the defaults for your site. You can always type ``?'' in any menu to display the current bindings.
The first thing you need to do is invoke mutt, simply by typing mutt at the command line. There are various command-line options, see either the mutt man page or the reference.
Information is presented in menus, very similar to ELM. Here is a table showing the common keys used to navigate menus in Mutt.
j or Down next-entry move to the next entry
k or Up previous-entry move to the previous entry
z or PageDn page-down go to the next page
Z or PageUp page-up go to the previous page
= or Home first-entry jump to the first entry
* or End last-entry jump to the last entry
q quit exit the current menu
? help list all keybindings for the current menu
Mutt has a builtin line editor which is used as the primary way to input textual data such as email addresses or filenames. The keys used to move around while editing are very similar to those of Emacs.
^A or <Home> bol move to the start of the line
^B or <Left> backward-char move back one char
^D or <Delete> delete-char delete the char under the cursor
^E or <End> eol move to the end of the line
^F or <Right> forward-char move forward one char
^K kill-eol delete to the end of the line
^U kill-line delete entire line
^W kill-word kill the word in front of the cursor
<Up> history-up recall previous string from history
<Down> history-down recall next string from history
<BackSpace> backspace kill the char in front of the cursor
^G n/a abort
<Tab> n/a complete filename (only when prompting for a file)
<Return> n/a finish editing
You can remap the editor functions using the bind command. For example, to make the Delete key delete the character in front of the cursor rather than under, you could use
bind editor <delete> backspace
Similar to many other mail clients, there are two modes in which mail is read in Mutt. The first is the index of messages in the mailbox, which is called the ``index'' in Mutt. The second mode is the display of the message contents. This is called the ``pager.''
The next few sections describe the functions provided in each of these modes.
c change to a different mailbox
ESC c change to a folder in read-only mode
C copy the current message to another