Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aerc – An email client that runs in the terminal

aerc-mail.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 271 posts

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

#111

Post by BeetleB »

microcolonel wrote: post #44
ddevault wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not ignorant of how emacs works - I was just giving you a cheeky response to your cheeky comment.

You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky. As currently configured, opening gnus on my (admittedly a bit large) Maildir takes more than an hour (no, really, I'm not joking); of course, once it's up I dare not close it, and that works out fine for me.

>You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky.

gnus is not the only way to do email in Emacs. IME, it is the most bloated way to do it.

While I didn't like the tone of the person's comment, I do sympathize with him. I used various email programs (pine, mutt, Thunderbird, etc) for years - but all of them seemed to lack something, and the effort to add my desired features was too high. With Emacs, the barrier to customize my workflow is a lot lower. Now that I've been using Emacs + notmuch for mail for the last few years, it's really hard to motivate myself to try anything outside Emacs, and the feeling is much worse when it's something cool like this.

I even haven't bothered with alot, although it is notmuch based. I mean, is it trivial for me to make an Org mode TODO linking to an email while in alot?

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

#112

Post by egh »

microcolonel wrote: post #98
cjbprime wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a little odd -- I was using gnus with maildirs that size ten years ago and it wasn't so bad. nnmaildir backend for gnus, right? I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too.

> I remember something about increasing the emacs memory limit before garbage collection kicks in, too. That seems interesting, I'll look at that. If there's one thing I have, it is a lot of memory. I would be okay if my whole Maildir was mmapped, as long as that made gnus faster.

(I have used Wanderlust on emacs for about 15 years now.)

I think using maildir directly may be hard to squeeze good performance out of with emacs. I'd suggest trying the alternatives: for eample, IMAP with ~30k messages should work decently in Wanderlust (and I would assume gnus), though initial load is slow (way less than hours, though). Using mu (maildir utils) via search in wanderlust to load 30k messages take about 1 minute, but if you are using mu you should be searching, not loading an entire mailbox. So there are probably some options out there, but I'd avoid loading 40k messages from a maildir directly.

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

#113

Post by zokier »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #97
shereadsthenews wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting and different. I guess I am accustomed to the "unix way": I use screen to multiplex my terminal and I have no bad problems from running multiple instances of mutt on the same maildir.

That workflow to me seems like more of a hack begging to be improved than a comfortable daily driver. I've never had a problem running mulitple instances of mutt, either - and I run multiple instances of aerc sometimes, actually - but since aerc has ownership over your emails and mail accounts it only makes sense to me that it would multiplex them for you.

I'd argue that the aerc approach is also bit of hack[1], but ultimately it mostly boils down to the limitations of terminals; to have "sub-windows", you need to implement basically a whole windowing system and terminal emulation layer.

Makes me think what would email client designed for and integrated with tmux look like, i.e. the client would open new tmux panes for editors etc.

[1] don't take that as a hard criticism, I happen to think lot of things, especially around terminals, being hacks.

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

#117

Post by stevekemp »

rlue wrote: post #89

I haven't dug too deep into the features or how this works yet, but it's very exciting to see any kind of movement in this space at all. I've spent a lot of time configuring mutt just the way I like it, but I'd throw it all away in a heartbeat for a good, modern alternative. My wishlist: * A daemon that pulls new mail from my IMAP servers to my local maildir as soon as it arrives. (I know mutt has an IMAP mode, and i…

I came up with my own mutt-alike, written with Lua for real scripting. Sadly it seems these projects are pretty niche, they're also damn hard to write.

I spent a lot of time fighting with malformed MIME messages, etc. Then adding on GPG-support, and handling the UI, all becomes a huge time-sync.

Still I now have a client that I love, even if nobody else does!

https://lumail.org/

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

#118

Post by krzyk »

cik wrote: post #46
elagost wrote: post #31

I'd leave Thunderbird in a heartbeat if I could find a contact/calendar syncing terminal client as well. Any recommendations?

I currently use Thunderbird for mail, and MineTime for calendar. I found the Thunderbird calendar integrations (5 calendars) way too flaky.

Would be good to have a calendar client in terminal.

MineTime looks cool, but I got a wrong feeling about the looks and yeah, scrolling down and I saw it: "MineTime is a calendar built on Electron". Nah, I prefer to have just one browser open (and not Chrome/Chromium).

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

#119

Post by c256 »

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…

> I never understood why it was impossible to have any kind of multithreading in emacs.

There are various ways to do multithreading in emacs now, but the answer to your question is usually “there’s a lot of existing elisp that isn’t thread-safe”, and that’s still kind of a problem.

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

#120

Post by mhd »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #90
shereadsthenews wrote: post #86

Is it groundbreaking to display mail with an external pager or to pipe it to filters? These were/are core features of elm, from 1986.

IMO the key innovation is that aerc does it with an embedded terminal emulator, tmux-style. This allows you to keep using the client for other things while reading or composing emails.

It's interesting that these days it's quite easy to get into deep terminal emulator inception: xterm/Terminal.app/WSL -> tmux/screen -> vim and now aerc.
Post reply on HN