# Sup 0.9 released

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sup-0-9-released/176540>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [October 1, 2009, 8:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sup-0-9-released/176540 "2009-10-01T20:45:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![trucker](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/ecae2f/32.png) [@trucker](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/trucker)\
**Post date:** [October 1, 2009, 8:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/sup-0-9-released/176540/1 "2009-10-01T20:45:14Z")

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I’m pleased to announce the release of Sup 0.9.

Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email.  
It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact-  
list management, and more. If you’re the type of person who treats  
email as an extension of your long-term memory, Sup is for you.

Get it: gem install sup  
Learn it: [http://sup.rubyforge.org](http://sup.rubyforge.org)  
Love it: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid

Excitement in 0.9:

- Experimental Xapian backend to replace Ferret. Not everything works  
with it,  
but it’s fast and less likely to barf. See release notes.
- New keybinding: “G” for reply-all.
- New hook: custom-search, for adding your own query expansions.
- Better preemptive thread loading.
- Random UI tweaks: display labels before subjects, change  
thread-view-mode’s  
‘n’ and ‘p’ commands slightly
- Better killing of other Sup processes.
- Die gracefully upon SIGKILL.
- Finally figure out the curses+ruby magic to make SIGWINCH (i.e. xterm  
resizing) work correctly.
- Add a console mode (press ~) for interactively playing with the index.
- Finally figure out the curses magic to stop the weird keyboard  
behavior after  
leaving the editor.
- Improved logging. Logging now supports SUP\_LOG\_LEVEL environment  
variable.  
Set this to “debug” for verbiage.
- As always, many bugfixes and tweaks.

Release notes:

There’s a new Xapian backend as an alternative to the Ferret one. It’s  
still in  
a beta stage. It’s much faster and much less prone to the random crashes  
than  
Ferret, but certain things don’t work yet, most noticeably the unread  
message  
counts in label-list-mode.

You can switch back and forth between both indexes without harm,  
_except_ any  
new messages added to the one index won’t be picked up by the other.  
Follow  
these instructions:

To TRY the Xapian index, without screwing Ferret up:

1. sup-dump \> dump # takes a while
2. export SUP\_INDEX=xapian # or however you do it  
in your  
shell
3. sup-sync --all --all-sources --restore dump # takes a long time
4. sup -n # -n ensures that no polling is done. don’t hit  
‘P’  
either

Step 1 will take a long time, and step 3 will take a very long time.

At this point, whenever you run Sup, the SUP\_INDEX environment variable  
will  
determine which index you use. If it’s unset, or “ferret”, you will use  
the  
ferret index. If it’s “xapian”, the Xapian index. Make sure when you run  
sup  
with the Xapian index, you use -n and don’t hit ‘P’, to avoid loading  
new  
messages into it.

If you want to switch to Xapian permanently, you can then:

1. rm -rf ~/.sup/ferret
2. permanently set SUP\_INDEX=xapian according to your shell
3. Run sup as normal, i.e. without -n.

If you want to go back to Ferret, you can just rm -rf ~/.sup/xapian and  
make  
sure your SUP\_INDEX environment variable is unset.