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Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

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Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#61

Post by kkfx »

syntaxing wrote: post #49
superkuh wrote: post #46

This is the first I've read of "TUI" standing for what I have to assume is "terminal user interface"? I'd call them CLI (command line interface). When did this TUI acronym start? What does it mean? Everyone else seems to know it and use it without defining.

I dont know when it exactly started but I've heard and use this term at least 15 years. CLI != TUI. TUI is more like a "standard" window (GUI) but all text based.

Well... CLI is Command Line Interface, or a classic ./name --options reading output in a terminal and writing options, piping to other tools to tweak the output. It's good for some usages, and for scripting, but not much for event-loop based activities.

TUI, Textual User Interface today tend to be a 2D terminal graphic, from ncurses to framebuffer. Classically it's simply a 2D UI based on text, so for instance Plan 9 ACME editor is a TUI since it's graphic but you can write text anywhere creating and changing menus, toolbars etc.

I think there is no official Jargon File entry to clarify this, 99% of the time people name TUI an ncurses UI, witch is a debatable since it can be not really usable as text and so as Terminal User Interface, but a CLI is also a terminal user interface.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#62

Post by abound »

I got sick of having five different GMail tabs open (and two non-GMail mail tabs open), so I have been setting up aerc this week, using the Notmuch backend and either lieer (for GMail) or mbsync (for non-GMail) to sync the mail.

Its taken maybe a dozen hours to get it set up and get into the flow, but I find it much, much more enjoyable than my previous workflow. Plus, though GMail tabs each took a 100+ MB of memory in Firefox, the new setup is much less heavyweight, and the local search is speedy and high quality.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#63

Post by abound »

joemi wrote: post #57
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?

Yeah not sure what OP meant, it has a "passthrough" mode for composing, basically every key combo is passed to the editor (Helix in my case, very similar to Vim), and control is returned to aerc when you close the editor

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#64

Post by aidenn0 »

abound wrote: post #62

I got sick of having five different GMail tabs open (and two non-GMail mail tabs open), so I have been setting up aerc this week, using the Notmuch backend and either lieer (for GMail) or mbsync (for non-GMail) to sync the mail. Its taken maybe a dozen hours to get it set up and get into the flow, but I find it much, much more enjoyable than my previous workflow. Plus, though GMail tabs each took a 100+ MB of memory…

If you are using Notmuch, I recommend trying bower[1]. It is a TUI for interacting with notmuch, and can even be configured to do so over ssh, so that e.g. opening attachments can happen on your local machine, even if your notmuch db is on a different computer.

1: https://github.com/wangp/bower

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#66

Post by Ringz »

Aerc has been my daily driver for a long, long time. I use it with IMAP (GMail and other reasons) but its completely usable with local mail directories.

- I have redefined the Aerc key mapping with a set of Vim-like keybindings, since I am too old to learn new keybindings. And I bet now I as fast as possible slashing through countless mails…

- I configured Aerc to work properly with Gmail and Imapfilter.

- I created some filters that I missed from any mail client I ever tried (at least two keystrokes away). Like:

  ff = :filter -f "{{index (.From | emails) 0}}"  # filter mails from current sender
  fs = :filter -H subject:"{{.SubjectBase}}"  # Show Mails with the same subject
  fS = :filter -H subject: # filter mails with subject e.g. "fs foo" filters mails with subject containing "foo"
If someone is interested, I will link my GitHub repo.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#67

Post by wgrover »

daft_pink wrote: post #43

I would really love to try a terminal email client with html email parsing. I miss pine.

I miss Pine too. I could read/file/delete scores of plaintext emails in seconds using single keystrokes.

Every email client I've used since Pine has been better at dealing with all the stuff we've bolted on to email (HTML, attachments, calendar invites...) but none of them have been as efficient at the core tasks of email as Pine was.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#68

Post by vegabook »

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?

A constrained environment forces developers to distill to the essence of the problem, thereby possibly understanding it better. It's the old "simple can be harder than complex" attributed to Steve Jobs.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#69

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

Gnome Evolution definitely supports modifying the folder sort order. There is an "Edit sort order" option in the "Folder" menu.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#70

Post by aidenn0 »

superkuh wrote: post #46

This is the first I've read of "TUI" standing for what I have to assume is "terminal user interface"? I'd call them CLI (command line interface). When did this TUI acronym start? What does it mean? Everyone else seems to know it and use it without defining.

I've seen TUI used for at least a decade? Things like this used to be just called "GUIs" even when running fully in text-mode back in the DOS days.

IMO "ed" is a CLI (i.e. the primary form of interaction is a command line), and "vi" is a TUI.

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