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

Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

blog.sergeantbiggs.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 166 posts

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#52

Post by 3np »

kemiller wrote: post #11
Tmpod wrote: 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.

You can make this work! Sixels work with w3m (which you can either reconfigure or replace)

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#55

Post by kkfx »

The issues we humans have with emails in the present time lay in the lack of modern PERSONAL email tools development.

For modern and personal I mean NOT living on someone else mailserver but easily download or sync remote IMAPs, or to use them directly (with some issues [1]) or via a personal homeserver IMAP, with a modern search-based client like notmuch-emacs/mu4e, and a built-in decent filtering tool (like MailDrop).

We have essentially all the pieces (we can use IMAPFilter + OfflineIMAP to refile messages if we just sync them, or the old fetchmail + MailDrop if we download, using notmuch in Emacs or with also Aerc) but they are different software with different configs, styles, variable level of documentation and userfriendliness etc. There is NOTHING for less geek/expert users a thing that makes many considering email == webmails and so a webmail is a service by a third party (for such users) as is Slack, WhatsApp web and so on, a dangerous vision for the freedom of communication and the power emails offer.

I hope some think about that enough to makes thing changes not only at geek levels... It's not that hard having a MailDrop rule that match an ISP regular bill launching a script that add the due date, amount to an agenda, than check the local accounting software for relevant transaction presence and warn if something it's not as expects, not that hard with text-based tools, like org-agenda, BeanCount, MailDrop, emails. VERY hard with modern software and that's a big loss for many potential power users who can't profit of such easy automation simply because for them it's too long to learn and implement and often even an unknown option. IT was born to simply life and augment human cognition, it's very sad almost all have forgotten that.

[1] due to mail files naming syncing on multiple machines often create unread/tags annoyances, with duplicate messages generation and so on...

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#57

Post by joemi »

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…

> Also have trouble with shortcut overlapping in neovim and aerc.

I'm curious what you mean by this. Doesn't Vim use almost every key on the keyboard, so wouldn't this be a problem with pretty much any program?

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#58

Post by kkfx »

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?

Personally I use a hybrid, or Emacs under X11, witch is arguably a GUI but also text-based and why for me is because of:

- integration :: I can create in a single keypress (bind to org-store-link) a link to be inserted in a note (another single keypress, org-insert-link) to pretty anything, a specific place in a file, a whole file to be open with a specific app, a mail message, ...

- end-user-programming :: meaning I can easily have a function (or a script, outside Emacs, maybe) that when a new electricity bill email arrive to my inbox it add relevant information in the relevant contract note, an agenda info, a "special timer" [1] that check my BeanCount transaction for a relevant entry after a certain date etc. With LITTLE coding an user can get a personal BI without a BI monster and issues of feeding it all the time.

GUIs suffer from not being textual enough, TUIs due to the lack of full graphics abilities.

Desktop computing in a network is the most powerful form of computing we have, and unfortunately it's long lost for a modern mainframe model (cloud+mobile) witch is terribly limited and limiting and most not knowing anything else do not even understand the limit.

[1] a function that run at a date, and get re-created when a session restart to avoid loosing the timer after a reboot

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#59

Post by pwg »

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?

Besides the other reasons already posted, one big one if one runs one's own email server (have done so since circa 1999) is that remote access to email is just an ssh session.
Post reply on HN