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Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

git-send-email.io

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Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#51

Post by chrismorgan »

Step one would be improved with a small bit of JavaScript to sniff the platform and expand the most likely section (and ideally even move it to the top). Please don’t be allergic to small snippets of JavaScript that optionally enhance things.

Keyboard and screen-reader accessibility of the radio button accordion technique is completely ruined by the use of `display: none` on the radio buttons. That could be remedied by zero-sizing them instead in one of quite a few ways. Note however that this will make Up/Down arrows switch section instead of scroll as a user might expect—that’s part of why radio buttons are not a good match for this type of widget (to say nothing of improper exposure to accessibility tech).

Keyboard accessibility is also poor due to weak and missing focus indication.

I would strongly recommend replacing the magic radio button technique with semantically and functionally appropriate elements; then, if you want opening one to close the rest, add a small snippet of JavaScript to that effect. (Then users with JS disabled will be able to open multiple sections, and that’s fine.)

The use of various CSS tricks has the side-effect that scroll position doesn’t always act in the way you might expect. I recommend augmenting such cases with small JS snippets to enhance the behaviour.

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#52

Post by hallgnop »

yellowapple wrote: post #33
bo1024 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting closer to public-key authentication, I guess that's good.

Ooooooo. Is there such a thing as SSMTP/SIMAP (i.e. something that is to SMTP/IMAP as SFTP is to FTP - i.e. an SSH-based thing that sends and/or receives mail to/from a mail server)? It'd be badass to be able to literally just use my SSH keys to authenticate when sending/receiving mail.

You can literally invoke imapd over ssh and it will preauthenticate as the user that invoked imapd. I used to do this with PINE 20 years ago. Good luck getting any of the big MSPs to support it, though.

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#53

Post by u801e »

sevensor wrote: post #4

One thing a lot of email providers (at least gmail and fastmail) do is let you create application passwords that you can use for specific purposes. So if you're at all queasy about having your password in plain text on the hard drive, you can create a special password just for git. Edit: you don't have to set up a terminal email client at this point, but if you figure out how to use git-send-email, you're just inches…

> having your password in plain text on the hard drive

That's not necessary for git. git has a facility called git credential that can allow it to cache the password (or other piece of information) for a given period of time[1]. So, when you use git send-email, it will prompt you for the the password.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-credential-cache

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#54

Post by jaytaylor »

I wanted so much to like this. The evolution of SirHat (better name :) is entertaining, and never leaving the cmdline would be great! And I was on board until encountering this type of tedium:

  Find the message ID to reply to.
  Don't stress too much about getting
  this step right, but it's a nice
  Courtesy for the people receiving
  your patch. On the mailing list
  Archives, look up the latest email
  In your thread and expand "Details"
  to find the Message ID. Copy this
  for the next step.
IMHO, needing to lookup email header IDs for each patch revision is an insane and terrible workflow! (At least, compared to gitbucketlabhub.)

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#55

Post by u801e »

Great tutorial. You may want to add a section about using git-format-patch to allow one to see the emails on disk and using git-send-email with those files. You may also want to add a caveats section about certain email providers.

In my experience, any Microsoft Exchange/O365 server will most likely mangle the email server side (introducing quoted-printable encoding characters or changing the message-id field. Gmail will require that you enable insecure application access in order to use git-send-email. If you don't do that, then using git-send-email will result in a authentication failure error (which you can see if you use the --debug flag).

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#56

Post by u801e »

jaytaylor wrote: post #54

I wanted so much to like this. The evolution of SirHat (better name :) is entertaining, and never leaving the cmdline would be great! And I was on board until encountering this type of tedium: Find the message ID to reply to. Don't stress too much about getting this step right, but it's a nice Courtesy for the people receiving your patch. On the mailing list Archives, look up the latest email In your thread and expan…

I've configured my email client (Thunderbird) to display it when viewing an email. I can simply right-click on the message-id value and get a context-menu with a "copy message-id" option.

Other mail clients should have something similar.

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#57

Post by black-tea »

chmln wrote: post #32

This is great for small one-off projects, but I don't know why anyone would want to promote the usage of mailing lists in general. The industry moved on to more centralized solutions like github for a reason - mailing lists are clunky, intuitive, and simply horrible for large discussions. Because old and large projects are using them doesn't mean it's a good reason for new projects to use them today. If anyone has pr…

Small, one-off projects like Linux, postgres, git?

What makes mailing lists worse for large discussions? Decent mail readers support threaded conversations and decent mailing list participants know how to quote properly. This has been around for decades and I don't think github discussions add anything except more noise maybe.

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#58

Post by forgotmypw »

stronglikedan wrote: post #13
OJFord wrote: post #2

No JS - I was baffled - did not know about ` ">`. Nice. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/la...

IMHO, the single-most underused HTML attribute. I get annoyed when I have to aim for the tiny box, instead of the nice long string of text next to it. Although, I can't count the number of times I was guilty of omitting it many moons ago.

I'm not sure how "proper" this is, but you can also put the checkbox inside the label, turning the whole thing into one big clickable area.

this is label

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#59

Post by forgotmypw »

jalbertbowden wrote: post #49
jancsika wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it better to nest the checkbox inside the label? Then you don't need the for attribute nor an id.

labels should always be to the right of the checkbox/radio controls. never nest them. nesting is ok for other form controls in some instances, but you'll run into issues with various screen readers if you apply the for attribute while nesting. on that note, always nest when possible; the ux benefits make it crazy not to take advantage of it.

Is there a reason to not nest the checkbox inside the label? I have always put them next to the checkbox until very recently, when I was trying to increase clickable area. I've found it ends up working much better than putting it beside, covering the area around the checkbox, too! Is this "improper HTML"?

Re: Show HN: Learn to use email with Git

#60

Post by forgotmypw »

jancsika wrote: post #36
stronglikedan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, the single-most underused HTML attribute. I get annoyed when I have to aim for the tiny box, instead of the nice long string of text next to it. Although, I can't count the number of times I was guilty of omitting it many moons ago.

Isn't it better to nest the checkbox inside the label? Then you don't need the for attribute nor an id.

You still have to do the complementary for= and id=, but I am also a proponent of nesting, though I have not solicited public opinion on it until just now.

Here is how I started doing it:

display alphabet

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