mailcap handler for plain/text requiring a tty crashes alot 0.9.1

[roosemberth]

Describe the bug
I cannot open any thread from the search view. When I try opening a thread, the thread view is displayed and so are the message headings (incl. title, date and tags), but not any of the message bodies; at this time the interface is completely frozen and I'm forced to C-c the application.

Software Versions

• Python version: Python 3.7.7
• Alot version: 0.9.1
• Nixpkgs 0682ec40c68bf86fc002b56395e68dd5fe754738 (release 20.09).

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behaviour:

1. open search buffer
2. open any thread
3. thread view freezes without showing any message contents.

No error log whatsoever.

After bisecting alot, the problem was introduced by commit b1c93c4. But I am unable to fix the problem myself.

[pazz]

Looking at the bisected commit, I suspect that you have set up a text/plain mime entry that is used without your knowing.
Do you see the message summaries?

Check your ~/.mailcap and /etc/mailcap for text/plain entries. If they exist then msg bodies will be piped through these tools and if they don't produce output you get "empty" messages.

[roosemberth]

Hi o/

Thanks for your message. That's correct; indeed I have text/*; xdg-open "%s" in ~/.mailcap, which itself resolves to nvim. I suppose that nvim tries to take over the terminal and this fails crashing alot in the process.

I have added an entry for text/plain (as provided in the reference commit message) and this solves my issue. However, I feel like a message like "opened with %s" should be displayed. In any case, an incorrect mailcap configuration should not freeze the interface.

[roosemberth]

Also, I just noticed that the order between text/*, text/html and text/plain is important. I would expect the most adequate filter to be matched; but perhaphs that's a different issue.:wq

[pazz]

You mean the order in which these are listed in the mailcap? Yes, I think that is relevant but standard behaviour for anything that uses mailcaps: the first match wins.