Live data from Hacker News

Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

blog.sergeantbiggs.net

21–30 of 166 posts

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#22
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

w3m supports inline images; I don't know if they work in aerc, though.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#26

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.

Composability is what I love about Notmuch: https://notmuchmail.org/

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#28

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

Personal preference. Perks include consistency and hackability. Mutt for instance hasn't changed a whole lot in decades. The relative simplicity and stability also means I'm not running into a whole lot of bugs. GUI email clients on the other hand...

Resource usage is also about as low as you can get.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#29
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.

Rendering HTML emails is fine, IMO, unless you want images. (I use mutt with w3m auto-view.) What’s more difficult is authoring/replying to HTML emails.
Post reply on HN