Thunderbird in 2019 • Hacker News Board

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#161

Post by ahartmetz » Thu, Jan 03, 2019, 8:29 PM UTC

xte wrote: post #151

ahartmetz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain how QML is a mess? I've been using it almost as long as it exists - which is much longer than the life of the average hot JS framework - and didn't notice the mess. It has problems and limitations like everything, but overall it's very productive.

Essentially because require tons of fragile boilerplate code to work and it's mostly designed with web principle in mind, not desktop one. You essentially can't found a QML GUI that not exhibit tons of error, from commercial one like TeamViewer to Kde/Plasma. It's surely more flexible than classic widgets but it's flexibility is not designed in a manageable way.

> require tons of fragile boilerplate code to work

Well yeah, you need to implement the properties and data models in C++ and export them - if you are doing it right that is. But the UI code is very quick and easy to write in return!

> it's mostly designed with web principle in mind, not desktop one

Not mainly desktop, true - it is designed mainly for touchscreens, mobile or embedded. It is easy to use exactly because it's not a web technology bent for user interfaces.

> exhibit tons of error

Not for the things I've been working on, which includes KDE / Plasma and many commercial applications.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#162

Post by jcranmer » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 3:50 AM UTC

sciurus wrote: post #157

jcranmer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot db/mork, which is another ~100K-ish LOC (at least as measured by wc -l).

Oops! I'm not actually familiar with the Thunderbird source's organization, so I just went by what was marked as owned by Thunderbird in that wiki page I linked.

In practice, Thunderbird is all of comm-central sans suite/ and chat/. calendar/ used to be Sunbird [a standalone calendar client], but those people decided to channel all of their resources into Lightning instead, so all of the Sunbird-specific stuff was ripped out.

Lightning is strictly speaking an independent project from Thunderbird, but it is far and away the most-used extension in Thunderbird and parts of it (particularly the backend) have essentially moved into the TB distribution for various policy reasons. There's some other stuff that's basically build system, release engineering, or testing gunk, but that stuff is mostly Python anyways and won't impact the SLOC metrics too badly.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#163

Post by Fnoord » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 10:01 AM UTC

shock wrote: post #83

Fnoord wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mailspring? [1] Its FOSS. [1] https://getmailspring.com

Only part of it is FOSS (the UI basically), the sync engine is closed source and using Mailspring requires creating a Mailspring account FWIW.

Doesn't it use MailCore and SquirrelMail?

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#164

Post by fouc » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 8:51 PM UTC

sciurus wrote: post #44

zmix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird is an XML+CSS+Javascript app. Just like Electron (well, Electron is not XML).

Looking at the languages used in Thunderbird source ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tree_Rules/comm-central#Thunderbird ): $ cloc build/ ldap/ editor/ mailnews/ mail/ 3938 text files. 3848 unique files. 949 files ignored. github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.80 T=6.01 s (497.6 files/s, 127309.9 lines/s) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code ------…

is there a node_modules directory that didn't get ignored?

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#165

Post by timbit42 » Fri, Jan 04, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

kgwxd wrote: post #146

halfastack wrote: post #17

Thunderbird is, hands down, my most used desktop app, if we're not counting IDEs and editors. Definitely would recommend; Thunderbird is awesome.

Not counting browsers?

Maybe they don't surf the web all day at work.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#166

Post by zmix » Sat, Jan 05, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #37

zmix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird is an XML+CSS+Javascript app. Just like Electron (well, Electron is not XML).

By that definition would you call Firefox before version ~40 a javascript app? It obviously isn't despite using XUL and the elements implicit in that. The same is true of Thunderbird.

Yes, I would and would not ;-)

The technology in use is called XPFE. For a full (graphical) overview, see http://mb.eschew.org/1

It is different sorts of XML (XBL, XUL, RDF, DTD) controlled via Javascript and styled by CSS running on top of a C++ runtime. The components, the runtime exposes, can be accessed directly from within Javascript. Most of the application specific stuff is written in the XML+JS+CSS domain. There may be the one or other app-specific support library, but in the end, they all run on top of the same xulrunner binary.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#167

Post by kgwxd » Mon, Jan 07, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

timbit42 wrote: post #165

kgwxd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not counting browsers?

Maybe they don't surf the web all day at work.

Reference; research; testing and debugging web sites in the 5 major desktop browsers; communication and data entry apps required for work that have a horrible desktop client, or no desktop client at all; etc. There's a lot of useful, work related things browsers provide access to.

Re: Thunderbird in 2019

#168

Post by rstuart4133 » Tue, Jan 15, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

paulie_a wrote: post #47

kuon wrote: post #38

I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...) Things I'd like to see improved: - Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars). - Native PGP. - Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fu…

I always thought the search was excellent when I used it. At one point I had a 100k of emails. But I could find what ever I needed. Meanwhile Outlook failed with a certain local file size limit and caused endless problems. They were apparently okay with that and resisted change to something that actually worked.

The quick search bar is the one thing I find exasperating about Thunderbird. The advanced search works as you would expect, but I have no idea what the quick search is supposed to do. It does not do the one thing I'd expect it to do - a substring match on the email addresses and subject.