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Switching to the Mutt Email Client

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#111

Post by ams6110 »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

I use emacs for my mail, with the notmuch mail package which gives me Gmail-like search ability. w3m is used to display HTML email in the emacs frame, and it does a good job with tables and inline images.

I find the emacs editing experience so superior to anything else that I feel hamstrung in Gmail or Outlook.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#112

Post by john64121 »

MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

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Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#113

Post by to3m »

pleasecalllater wrote: post #89
nazri1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is an IDE can only do so much - depending solely on the IDE mean your ability to change/refactor the code is limited to exactly what the IDE gives you. If you need to do something that the IDE can't do for you then you're stuck. This is when being competent in Vim/Emacs/Shell is an advantage.

Could you tell me what was the last problem you had that an IDE couldn't do, and vim/emacs could?

This happens to me in these main day-to-day cases, comparing Emacs to Visual Studio and Xcode:

- VS/Xcode don't support keyboard macros

- VS/Xcode don't support piping selection through a shell command (I had to write an addin to do it: https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts)

More generally, your window layout options in both are a lot more limited, and, worst of all, the extensibility experience in both is poor. Extensibility is basically non-existent in Xcode, and while it looks comprehensive in VS the APIs are rather unwieldy and underdocumented and the iteration time for testing is very bad.

Good extensibility support opens up many possibilities! Even with what VS gives you, you can get good stuff like Comment Reflower, or (if I say so myself) my VSScripts addin. But Emacs just does that side of things a lot better.

For example, multiple-cursors.el, which is an Emacs addon, is a huge improvement over the box selection available in VS/Xcode.

Adding reasonable support for a language to Emacs is easy to do in a couple of hours, possibly working from one of the many examples, and you can continue refining it from there. In VS by contrast options are the two extremes of "pretend it's one of the other languages VS supports already" (little better than Notepad with syntax highlighting) or "invest a week (plus) in writing an entire new language infrastructure, with no examples to work from" (I'm sure the results are good if you put the effort in though). For most under-supported languages you'll meet, Emacs is much closer to the effort/reward sweet spot.

(Xcode? I don't think you can make it support new languages at all.)

It's been a while since I used WebStorm (Javascript-oriented IDE) but my response to that was similar.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#114

Post by sotojuan »

icebraining wrote: post #109
TurboHaskal wrote: post #26

Ugh, no thanks. I already use enough arcane tools on a daily basis due to my work. For mundane stuff like reading and sending mail, I'd rather take a break and use tools that even my tech illiterate father could effectively use. It's really detoxicating to become a normie from time to time. Disclaimer: Used to read mail with emacs back in the day. Tried mutt for a while.

Doing like the "normies" is switching from a decent red wine to piss beer. Not what I would call detoxicating.

This kind of attitude is not helpful. Sometimes even tech people want things that work "good enough" with no configuration or thinking involved. No need to go full normie.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#115

Post by lightdot »

jk2323 wrote: post #58

I tried Mutt a long time ago but did not like it (may not even got it to work properly). I always like Pine/Alpine. I only moved to Thunderbird, which is buggy and a resource hog, after I had to handle a dozen email accounts. Question: How are many POP/IMAP accounts are currently handled under Pine/Alpine? Possible?

I've been using multiple IMAP and SMTP accounts in Alpine for years, the setup works nicely.

I've had some issues with how Alpine handles connection time outs though, as it annoyingly blocks the UI from time to time. Need to look further into this...

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#116

Post by mikegerwitz »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #22
MikeTaylor wrote: post #21

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience. I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

Richard Stallman (RMS) uses emacs for email as well. I can't imagine it. Too much valuable information comes in the form of rich emails for me to even try.

This is in part a cultural thing. Within GNU, many are hostile toward non-plaintext e-mail and might even ask you to resend plaintext. But we're a group of people that live and die by text. Many hackers are extremely efficient in processing text. Adding document formats like HTML into the mix muddies things unless you have very specialized tools for dealing with it.

And then you have people who start using formatting semantically, e.g. colors.

Now, with all of that said, Emacs does a remarkable job of rendering a subset of HTML. For example, I have my mail client configured to always ignore HTML alternatives unless they're the only option. In that case, colors and tables and such are all rendered as they should be. Inline images might be supported if you use a graphical version of Emacs (Emacs can definitely display images, I just haven't tried in this context); you also have the option to open it in an external viewer, like a web browser.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#117

Post by mikegerwitz »

szastupov wrote: post #78

I spent quiet some time setting up mutt or trying to make a real IDE out of vim or Emacs, but in the end it's just cargo cult and waste of time. There a modern email clients, IDEs, polished operating systems, etc., all built in this century. There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points.

> There is absolutely no need in wasting time scoring nerd points.

You're completely missing the point.

Sure, some people might do it to score points with their peers, but many of us use text-based clients because it fits well within our workflows. I used to use Mutt, because I do everything except for graphical web browsing (literally) on a terminal. I switched to Gnus in Emacs because it's heavily scriptable and has very convenient integration with Org Mode.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#118

Post by mikegerwitz »

oblio wrote: post #15

I feel that the folks that do this aren't working for big companies. In most big companies you can't really afford to do any email client shenanigans. You probably need to see HTML emails, handle calendar invites, etc.

> You probably need to see HTML emails, handle calendar invites, etc.

At work I use Outlook only for the calendar.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#119

Post by Freaky »

u801e wrote: post #7
worldsayshi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article seems to think that everyone should switch away from HTML. But how well does console clients deal with HTML emails. It's not like you can tell everyone to stop sending you HTML.

I suppose that mutt could be configured to either display the plain text MIME part of such an email, or pipe the HTML through something like links -dump.

~/.mailcap: text/html; lynx -force_html -dump %s; copiousoutput

~/.muttrc: alternative_order text/plain

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#120

Post by lottin »

icebraining wrote: post #106
szastupov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the point about Emacs being a OS, but don't you think it's kind of a dated clunky OS? Like "Mac OS 9" was, lacking memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Why would anyone want to be limited by technology when the rest of the world is moving forward?

The roots of the current macOS are much older than the classic Mac OS. Is that moving forward? What does it even mean?

It means that the OP doesn't know that he's talking about.
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