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Meli email client, pre-alpha release

meli.delivery

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Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#111

Post by Narishma »

paulcarroty wrote: post #45
rightos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still using Thunderbird, which is barely maintained for a decent standalone IMAP client - it's beginning to feel pretty ridiculous. I was having some search issues the other day and I looked at alternatives - the options were basically Outlook, Claws Mail which is ugly as sin, eM Client which is Windows only and Mailspring which actually looked pretty good... right up until it asked me to make an account for use…

Thunderbird has a big problem - UI still looks like written in 90's. I'm switched to Geary, good Apple Mail clone.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#112

Post by buildzr »

flukus wrote: post #49
rightos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still using Thunderbird, which is barely maintained for a decent standalone IMAP client - it's beginning to feel pretty ridiculous. I was having some search issues the other day and I looked at alternatives - the options were basically Outlook, Claws Mail which is ugly as sin, eM Client which is Windows only and Mailspring which actually looked pretty good... right up until it asked me to make an account for use…

On poor mail notifications and poor HTML support, those are strengths. Email is not a real time communication mechanism and most emails I receive I'd be happy to never be notified about, it's mostly just a deluge of unnecessary information. The same goes for html email, it's just an unnecessary intrusion into life from marketers obsessed with their branding over my convenience. When everything on your phone and deskt…

I do support work for my small business via email, I need to know if a network is having problems, when a server goes down, if any users are having payment issues and jump in to fix these immediately if not sooner. A console ding as an email notification that I can't differentiate from pressing backspace one too many times is absolute trash.

Ideally I want Android-style reply in the notification level stuff.

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#113

Post by em-bee »

hawski wrote: post #76
Ahmed90 wrote: post #22

With all respect for the hard work done on this client, but is it just me or is the TUI getting too much attention recently?? I think the GUI stacks are too bloated or too hideous (electron, cpp/qt,c# and it's limitations, etc...) to work with these days so much that the cool kids (hardcore techy people) just gave up and started doing TUIs to solve their own problems directly?

I wonder if it would be possible to do a GUI mostly-drop-in replacement for ncurses. Immediate advantages, at least for me: - a possibility to use proportional fonts, it's more pleasant for me and increases content density - borders and other decorations could be smaller, increasing density - smooth scrolling could be implemented, which is nice - it could better integrate with desktop environment Possible and very mu…

i had similar thoughts. what would a modern terminal look like? one where positions and cursor movements are not defined by obscure escape codes but by a proper API.

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#114

Post by michaelmrose »

Crinus wrote: post #78
michaelmrose wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is complicated about linux Mint or even Debian?

Gtk3 is awful and broke backwards compatibility with Gtk2 so you need to have at least those two in your system to run applications (since many still need Gtk2). Gtk2 does not get any meaningful updates anymore. Gtk4 will soon be released and repeat the cycle. Same with Qt5, anything that needs Qt4 or less is now broken unless you use Slackware which tries to keep everything it ever had (it even has Gtk1). Qt5 is mad…

Neither gtk3 nor qt5 are particularly heavy as far as resources usage. Keeping older versions of libraries like gtk is the cost of keeping a rapidly shrinking cast of existing apps working. Note that qt4 and gtk2 are 7 and 8 years old respectively and can be used with current OS if needed by legacy apps. If your distro opts not to support it the dev or packager can ship it with the application. See flatpak or better nix.

The storage consumed is reasonable in terms of modern sizes storage.

Purely from the perspective of the end user I'm not sure I understand what the difficulty is.

The user doesn't care if the app is gtk 2 or 17. From the user's perspective they click install and an icon appears and their free hard drive space goes down a tiny amount.

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#115

Post by Fnoord »

cyphar wrote: post #32
Ahmed90 wrote: post #22

With all respect for the hard work done on this client, but is it just me or is the TUI getting too much attention recently?? I think the GUI stacks are too bloated or too hideous (electron, cpp/qt,c# and it's limitations, etc...) to work with these days so much that the cool kids (hardcore techy people) just gave up and started doing TUIs to solve their own problems directly?

I switched to using TUIs for everything except web browsing ~8 years ago (and I switched from GMail to Mutt ~3 years ago). I honestly can't imagine going back (I'm a Linux user so this might bias my viewpoint). GUIs either feel dated or sluggish, and I find that there are far more mature and continually-maintained TUI projects for most developer-related tasks than GUI ones. This is probably because (Linux) developers…

You can switch the last one (web browsing) to TUI as well via Browsh [1]. Uses Firefox internally.

[1] https://www.brow.sh/

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#116

Post by Fnoord »

pushpop wrote: post #62
Ahmed90 wrote: post #22

With all respect for the hard work done on this client, but is it just me or is the TUI getting too much attention recently?? I think the GUI stacks are too bloated or too hideous (electron, cpp/qt,c# and it's limitations, etc...) to work with these days so much that the cool kids (hardcore techy people) just gave up and started doing TUIs to solve their own problems directly?

TUIs aren’t getting any more or less attention than they’ve always gotten. I guess you could argue that with the recent-ish rise of new CLI-friendly languages and frameworks like Go, Rust and Node that the people are reinventing the wheel in terms of terminal based tooling. However there has always been a strong undercurrent of people favouring the terminal for most types of work (myself included).

Some TUIs even have mouse (optional) support.

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#117

Post by Fnoord »

sthottingal wrote: post #30

A big disadvantage with TUI based email clients is it can only work with English or latin script based languages. Complex scripts( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_text_layout ) does not render properly in terminals.

That might be a big disadvantage for you; it is a feature I don't miss at all. Mutt supports UTF-8, and that's all I need.

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#119

Post by Fnoord »

Ahmed90 wrote: post #22

With all respect for the hard work done on this client, but is it just me or is the TUI getting too much attention recently?? I think the GUI stacks are too bloated or too hideous (electron, cpp/qt,c# and it's limitations, etc...) to work with these days so much that the cool kids (hardcore techy people) just gave up and started doing TUIs to solve their own problems directly?

TUIs are as cross-platform and network-able on as many clients as you are able to run SSH clients on. They also support resuming (via a terminal multiplexer such as Tmux/Screen; tmux itself can also support session resuming via a plugin), windowing/tabs (via term mux), scrolling (via term mux). So your TUI program does not need any of these features. If you have a computer running 24/7 you can connect to term mux over SSH from anywhere you want. If you have high latency such as LTE or bad WLAN, you can use Mosh to easy with the latency. Either you, you aren't using a lot of bandwidth with a TUI. You can also use the power of the UNIX shell easily together with a term mux. For example, jessfraz runs all her CLI commands in Docker.

Why I like it? Well, if you're a Emacs user and you can get everything to work with Emacs-esque keybinds that's great. Same with vi(m) keybinds. With Mutt, its a matter of setting EDITOR right and you can compose your e-mails with vi(m) (yes, you could set EDITOR to something more nefarious ;). You don't get to make such choices with a GUI e-mail client.

Re: Meli email client, pre-alpha release

#120

Post by xenator »

krageon wrote: post #93
SyneRyder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm willing to pay, someone please give me a decent cross platform alternative with a GUI, ideally a proper, non-electron one. Have you tried Postbox? It's cross-platform Mac/Windows, native non-Electron (actually forked from Thunderbird long ago), supports multiple accounts, lots of keyboard shortcuts & paid non-subscription product developed by a company. I've been using it ever since Eudora died, it's the closes…

I appreciate that a lot of people use Mac and/or Windows, but calling it cross-platform and then excluding the third big platform option is I think missing the point.

Technically if it supports more than one platform it is already "cross-platform". It is not "every-" or "all-platform".
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