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Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

blog.sergeantbiggs.net

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Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#11

Post by kemiller »

Tmpod wrote: post #7
kemiller wrote: post #3

I miss using a TUI for mail but it looks like they haven’t really solved the most important reason I don’t, which is rendering HTML emails.

You can configure aerc to pass the email contents through an intermediate program depending on the MIME type. I believe it renders HTML through w3m by default or something like that. Of course it isn't full rendering with CSS and whatnot, but it is pretty good for most mails.

Yeah, I get that, but it's still not a great experience, and inconsistent. It would be cool to see something that uses iTerm's support for inline images: https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html

Not sure how practical that actually would be, but I can dream.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#12

Post by acaloiar »

Swarming wrote: post #10

I might be missing something but why would you want to use a terminal interface when a GUI is so much easier?

Your are indeed! Many people like myself prefer the lightning fast interaction of keyboard navigation, the mastery of the bindings to improve workflows, and the customization of bindings to create new ones.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#13

Post by tills13 »

acaloiar wrote: post #12
Swarming wrote: post #10

I might be missing something but why would you want to use a terminal interface when a GUI is so much easier?

Your are indeed! Many people like myself prefer the lightning fast interaction of keyboard navigation, the mastery of the bindings to improve workflows, and the customization of bindings to create new ones.

ok but GMail for example has keyboard shortcuts.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#15

Post by acaloiar »

tjoff wrote: post #6

aerc is really weird in the sense of being designed as a client, not storing the mails on your computer. Which has some performance implications and limitations. Though you can have local mail too, really felt like a second-class feature when I looked. But to be fair it has been a long time since I looked at it. Given the above I'm really surprised that IMAP doesn't work better than it does. Often gets disconnected a…

Using it with local mail dirs is definitely preferable. I would assume that most people use mail TUIs in conjunction with `mbsync`, `notmuch`, and similar utilities that improve the overall experience.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#16

Post by [deleted] »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #2

> This option is really simple: It allows us to override automatic sorting for certain folders. The specified folders are shown at the top of the folder list in the provided order. The rest are sorted alphabetically. This option should be in every email client. Sadly, I’ve never seen it in a graphical client (Thunderbird/Outlook) before. Isn’t this just favorites? I’ve used them for over a decade in Outlook to keep s…

[deleted]

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#18

Post by echoangle »

acaloiar wrote: post #12
Swarming wrote: post #10

I might be missing something but why would you want to use a terminal interface when a GUI is so much easier?

Your are indeed! Many people like myself prefer the lightning fast interaction of keyboard navigation, the mastery of the bindings to improve workflows, and the customization of bindings to create new ones.

Aren’t keyboard shortcuts and TUI/GUI pretty orthogonal? Is there not GUI client that has proper keyboard navigation?

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#19

Post by hello_computer »

The problem with a TUI is that it’s a silo. Makes more sense to have pipeable, scriptable program(s) to retrieve/filter/sync/send. Then you can make several different UIs for it—vim, emacs, web, vscode, acme, thick client, etc—with a minimum of effort. TUI ends up re-implementing a good part of tmux unnecessarily.
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