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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

#151

Post by Atreiden »

endorphine wrote: post #134

While tui mail clients always seemed appealing to me, I think I realized why something in me resists them. The terminal is my "meditation space"; it's where I go when I want to focus deeply and do real and work that I enjoy; my playground. Viewing or writing emails is a chore, just like Slack. I don't want that iny terminal.

This is enlightening. I prefer to lean heavily on my terminal for most things, but tui email + web browsing never quite "clicked" for me. And I feel like this perfectly encapsulates why. Thanks for putting words to the feeling!

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#152

Post by borg16 »

ktosobcy wrote: post #136
jackthetab wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in the Gmail integration. Tried it with mutt and decided I didn't want to spend an afternoon figuring it out. 'Sides, I hear that Gmail is phasing out IMAP. :-?

> 'Sides, I hear that Gmail is phasing out IMAP. :-? I'm so glad I "phased out" Gmail out of my life years ago...

what have you moved on to?

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#153

Post by yasser_kaddoura »

The-Compiler wrote: post #147
fossdd wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe dodo[1] is something for you. It is basically a graphical email client but with lots of vim-bindings. Basically the best of both worlds, terminal and graphical. Like the qutebrowser[2] for emails. However I think its kinda in a unmaintained state and only supports notmuch backend. 1: https://github.com/akissinger/dodo 2: https://qutebrowser.org/

qutebrowser author here, use Dodo and can confirm it's basically the qutebrowser of mail clients :) Development is slow but not unmaintained. The author comes back every month or so to merge PRs. Reminds me I have a bunch of local changes I should upstream...

I stumbled upon Dodo while checking your starred repos, and I think it deserves more attention than it has; it is mature enough to be used by users who wants customizibility, vim-bindings, and easy configuration. It's one of my top options to migrate to as a mail client if I find any problems with neomutt, which I am using right now.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#154

Post by abc123abc123 »

skowalak wrote: post #143
samuell wrote: post #137

I'm kind of locked in to Thunderbird as it manages decades of my mail. I wonder if one could develop a decent TUI for Thunderbird / its database...

I feel the same. I have "only" about 15 years worth of mail in Thunderbird but I am getting increasingly tired of working with the GUI, at least for reading and searching historical mail. One of these days I will convert my mbox mail to Maildir and try out notmuch.

I switched to alpine (https://alpineapp.email/) after 20 years of thunderbird. Converting 20 years of archived thunderbird emails took a couple of minutes with a script I found somewhere, so now everything rests securely in the Maildir format.

I am quicker, happier and more efficient with TUI email than ever before, and as a bonus, the memory and CPU footprint is too small to see.

What is important though is to keep in mind that I am not a power user. At most I might get 200 emails per day or so, but for that work loads everything works brilliantly.

I have automated rules, shortcuts, I can define my own keys, I can even rewrite the source for smaller things if I want.

I recommend everyone to invest a day or two just to see if it is for you.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#155

Post by hdb2 »

Ringz wrote: post #66

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…

> If someone is interested, I will link my GitHub repo.

I'm very interested...this post has encouraged me to play with aerc again, and the first filter you posted is something I have always wanted in an email client!

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#156

Post by consteval »

tills13 wrote: post #13
acaloiar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GMail, the web client, is an almost worthless email client. It has like maybe 1% of the features of thunderbird.

As with most web apps, it's more of a preview than an application.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#157

Post by haswell »

endorphine wrote: post #134

While tui mail clients always seemed appealing to me, I think I realized why something in me resists them. The terminal is my "meditation space"; it's where I go when I want to focus deeply and do real and work that I enjoy; my playground. Viewing or writing emails is a chore, just like Slack. I don't want that iny terminal.

I see this a bit differently. It’s exactly because some tasks feel like a chore that I gravitate to tools that improve the experience.

To me, keeping these tasks separate is just reinforcing the negative association those tasks have built up over time in my brain. The degree to which they continue sucking has as much to do with my own thinking about the tasks as the tasks themselves. I’d rather find ways to make the suckiest tasks even a tiny bit more palatable, and at least in my case, don’t find that this impacts the things I love about working in the terminal in any way.

At the end of the day, I’m going to have to tackle all of it eventually. Might as well make it easier on myself. YMMV.

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#158

Post by BeetleB »

snthpy wrote: post #132
BeetleB wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so I have been setting up aerc this week, using the Notmuch backend I strongly urge people to try notmuch. I switched to it in around 2011 and have never gone back. You don't have to use Emacs as the client. There are plenty of other frontends (including aerc). https://notmuchmail.org/frontends/ alot[1] is probably the most well known among them: https://github.com/pazz/alot

Looks really neat. Thanks. What do you use to sync your Gmail to local for notmuch to index?

I don't use Gmail :-)

You could use something like lieer[1] which will also sync your notmuch tags with gmail labels.

If you don't want to sync the labels, I'm sure there are plenty of solutions out there to download Gmail to your local machine in a well known format like Maildir.

[1] https://github.com/gauteh/lieer

Re: Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

#160

Post by stavros »

borg16 wrote: post #152
ktosobcy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'Sides, I hear that Gmail is phasing out IMAP. :-? I'm so glad I "phased out" Gmail out of my life years ago...

what have you moved on to?

Not the GP, but I use Fastmail and love it. I hear Protonmail is good too.
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