Fixing mutt and goobook

There are a lot of blog posts out there that show how to combine mutt and goobook. However, all of them that I have seen are wrong. This isn't a long, post, I'm not going to tell you about goobook and mutt, I'm just going to tell you the problem and the correct usage. I imagine this also goes for other query commands besides goobook.

First the problem. If you query a single word, things work fine. If you query two words, say a first and last name, goobook breaks. For example, if you type "joe smith" and then hit tab (or however you query) the display gets messed up and goobook says "unrecognized argument: smith". So, you change your query to just "joe" and then you have to manually wade through all of the "joe"'s in you contact list.

This is because you probably have this line in your mutt config:

set query_command="goobook query '%s'"

Don't feel bad, that line is in lots of blog posts.

This is what you should have:

set query_command="goobook query %s"

That is, no quotes around the %s. Mutt adds them automatically (see man muttrc).

Finally, you can type a first and last name to query!