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Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

aerc-mail.org

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Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#61

Post by cjbprime »

Neat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it:

https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-g...

Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never understood why it was impossible to have any kind of multithreading in emacs.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#62

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

inetknght wrote: post #60

Hmmm, I'm not familiar with command line email clients but this looks cool. I wonder if I can use aerc in a bash pipeline? Say, to pipe email content from/to gpg?

You can't pipe emails into aerc (yet?), but you can definitely pipe emails out of aerc. The :pipe command is bound to | by default, so you can type, for example, |gpg --decrypt | less.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#63

Post by ddevault »

cjbprime wrote: post #61

Neat! I used to be a kernel maintainer, and had a similar setup going inside emacs with gnus, and dvc-git commands bound to keys to apply patches. Here's an old blog post about some of it: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2010/10/04/git-patches-in-g... Gnus was too slow, but worse, emacs is single-threaded, so e.g. polling for new mail in the background blocked the rest of the editor while it happened. I never unders…

Hey, would you mind writing up some details about your email setup for kernel work to sir@cmpwn.com? I'd like to understand more email-driven workflows, especially from kernel maintainers, to guide aerc's design.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#65

Post by chrissnell »

I really, really like that the editor is embedded within the mail client. The need to shell out to vim or whatever is what always kept me from using Mutt, despite loving its UI.

aerc isn't quite as colorful or well-laid-out as Mutt but this is very promising.

This reminds me a lot of my all-time favorite mail editor, which I miss dearly: GoldED [0] [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldED

[1] https://blog.onlime.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CwkTcNSWQA... (Russian screenshot but you get the idea)

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#68

Post by megous »

ddevault wrote: post #58
megous wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mutt/Neomutt is much more mature and has more features and better performance. (fantastic threads support, fast and very flexible filtering, etc.) Aerc is very new and written in Go. I tested it on my 100 thousnand mail ARM linux mailing list archive, accessed via localhost dovecot IMAP server, to see the best case performance, but it doesn't look good, atm. It looks like this when I scroll through the archive: https…

aerc doesn't download all of your message headers upfront - mutt does. All that time you spend waiting for mutt to open your inbox is downloading all of the data that aerc is downloading as you scroll. Also, you can scroll faster with ^d/^u, half a page at a time, or pgup/pgdown, for a full page at a time. Yes, aerc is not yet as featureful or mature as mutt, but it definitely does not have inferior performance.

I use POP3, and only wait for mutt when changing to a folder (4s/100k mails). Then everything is basically instantaneous.

But yeah, I don't know about mutt IMAP performance, as I never used it. I've only configured a local IMAP server over my maildir to be able to try aerc. I have no clue why aerc is taking 100-200ms to load a single message (as you see in the video) from the localhost. Maybe naggle (is it even used on localhost)?

Also, I'm not sure how you'd make threads work while loading message list only partially. So full load of the message list is needed anyway (at least once and cache it locally). It's not some failing. I want thread that started 5 months ago to pop forward if new message is posted to it.

EDIT: Faster scrolling loads multiple messages at once faster. Maybe aerc can take into account that user may have scrolled past more than one message in the time the previous message finished loading.

Re: Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

#69

Post by fouc »

chrissnell wrote: post #65

I really, really like that the editor is embedded within the mail client. The need to shell out to vim or whatever is what always kept me from using Mutt, despite loving its UI. aerc isn't quite as colorful or well-laid-out as Mutt but this is very promising. This reminds me a lot of my all-time favorite mail editor, which I miss dearly: GoldED [0] [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldED [1] https://blog.onlime.…

Some color would be nice. (I quite like Irssi's color scheme)
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