331–340 of 345 posts
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The page footer might interest you. It directly answers your question. Quoting "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.
Fair. I like that minimal formatting there anyway. But often I have to communicate via email, report on complex issues, etc. It is nice to have some headings, tables, images in there.
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However, a significant portion of HTML mail I receive happily violates "accessibility laws" and omit to provide a text-only part. I know that, since I actually rely on accessibility to do my daily work.
How do they manage to do that? Embed the text as an image?
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My own client: lumail, c++, gpl https://github.com/lumail/lumail
It would be great if you inserted a screenshot of your client in action in the README.md. In my experience screenshots have excellent information density when it comes to evaluating software :)
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My own client: lumail, c++, gpl https://github.com/lumail/lumail
Can you fill out this survey for me? https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/be4f2eee45046e069a4bb175d9d539...
1. What is your mail client?
Lumail. Console based. lumail.org / github.com/lumail/lumail
2. Can you give me plain english instructions for composing plaintext emails by default?
Lumail is a console-based client, much like mutt. To compose an email your editor is launched. If no editor is configured vim will be used.
Plaintext composition is the only thing that is supported.
3. Does it hard-wrap your plaintext emails at 72 columns?
The mail client doesn't, since it opens a temporary file with your configured editor. You could configure your editor to enable/disable wrapping ..
4. Does it support format=flowed?
As above.
5. When replying to a message, does it put your reply above or below the quoted message you're repying to by default? Can you change this setting? How?
The editor opens a temporary file into which the quoted body of the mail you're replying to has been placed.
I configure my editor to be `vim +/^$ ++1` which puts the cursor above the mail, but below the headers.
You could do something similar to place the cursor at the bottom, but that would require a suitable editor-specific command to be set.
My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…
> Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. Yet, you cannot do any of that on HN (other than a limited case like italic ). But, we can communicate just fine without those features. I suppose it's really a difference of a read once message versus having a discussion. In a read once message, you can format it like you describe. That's…
And a message board is absolutely NOT email, so this is totally irrelevant.
My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…
It won't die, because the argument has the same merit today that it always has. That being said, I think it's useful to attach images to an email (not necessarily embed them in the content of the email, but attach them for sure). IMO HTML email is worse today than it's ever been. Often when I get an HTML email it takes me longer to parse it. On the bright side, the presence of HTML is a decent indicator of a marketin…
Enable that as a filter, and you'd get fired SO FAST in most of the places I work.
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Neither you nor the poster provide a reason why. Why is it better? How does plain text make it faster to respond? Or even faster to read?
I would say that the real performance drain is top posting, which seems to go hand in hand with HTML emails. With top posting, in order to read a mail - especially one that is a few levels deep in a thread - becomes an exercise in jumping back and forth, trying to find context and make sense of who replies to what, finding relevant sentences (often hidden in a mess of signatures). With bottom posting and proper curat…
Indeed, it would be nice if the netizens of the world would wake up to this. Sadly, I think it's unlikely to improve any time soon and so I'll stick to top posting and threading in the email client.
I'm surprised by the recommendation to use format=flowed. I set up thunderbird a while back to use the recommendations from the LKML: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients... . Doesn't format=flowed mangle patches? I've also disabled wrapping (as recommended in that document), however I'm not a big fan of it. I do think that plain text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters looks much nicer. I wish thu…
It will because every line would end in a single trailing whitespace character. But that doesn't mean you cannot use Thunderbird with format=flowed enabled to respond to patch emails. Unless you're including a patch in the message and expect someone to use git am to apply it to their local git repo, having format=flowed set won't matter.
> I wish thunderbird allowed me to select portions of the text to wrap, or to disable wrapping for selected portions
You can sort of do it by copying unwrapped text from another program and pasting it into Thunderbird as quoted text (ctrl-shift-o or paste as quotation). But you will need to manually remove the quote markers from the beginning of each line.
I'm surprised by the recommendation to use format=flowed. I set up thunderbird a while back to use the recommendations from the LKML: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients... . Doesn't format=flowed mangle patches? I've also disabled wrapping (as recommended in that document), however I'm not a big fan of it. I do think that plain text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters looks much nicer. I wish thu…
If you do format=flowed correctly, then code is not mangled. However, there is a higher risk (than with hard-wrapped) that users can mangle code with format=flowed.
:r file-containing-patch
:'s/$/\s/
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Exactly, work mailboxes are a treasure trove of automatically-archived information. I'd argue that these days, emails form more of a "knowledge base" than any other single repository of information for most organisations.
This is very true and yet the search tools supplied with these knowledge bases are terribly inadequate. Is there a better, standalone tool out there for turning email archives, from multiple sources, into a usable database with a powerful query language?