4.1. Overview

The main component is alot.ui.UI, which provides methods for user input and notifications, sets up the widget tree and maintains the list of active buffers. When you start up alot, init.py initializes logging, parses settings and commandline args and instantiates the UI instance of that gets passes around later. From its constructor this instance starts the urwid mainloop that takes over.

Apart from the central UI, there are two other “managers” responsible for core functionalities, also set up in init.py:

• ui.dbman: a DBManager to access the email database and
• alot.settings.settings: a SettingsManager oo access user settings

Every user action, triggered either by key bindings or via the command prompt, is given as commandline string that gets translated to a Command object which is then applied. Different actions are defined as a subclasses of Command, which live in alot/commands/MODE.py, where MODE is the name of the mode (Buffer type) they are used in.