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

Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client?

#11

Post by lincolnq »

I still use mutt. It's not great, but it's better than anything else I've tried. I ssh to my mail server and run mutt in a screen. My mail server has imap and webmail set up too, so it's fairly convenient no matter where I am.

I've wanted Mutt to be properly scriptable; it doesn't have much good in the way of configuration. I've been casually puttering around ideas for a long time about writing my own email client that's much more customizable. Maybe use a database backend?

Edit: looking at Sup, maybe it's what I want.

Re: Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client?

#14

Post by silentbicycle »

nmh and its Emacs client, mh-e, are pretty nice, and are an excellent fit for working in screen. It's been a couple years since I used it actively, but it's worth a look.

nmh in particular is a bundle of small command-line programs that "just" dump out a list of subject lines for unread messages, etc. Easy to build on.

Re: Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client?

#15

Post by Niten »

davidw wrote: post #2

Emacs? gnus: http://www.gnus.org/

I use Emacs for most things, but the fact that elisp isn't multithreaded made gnus a painful experience for me. I've had much better luck using Mutt--and setting the program's editor command to emacsclient -nw.

Sounds like this guy had a similar experience:

http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/2007/10/emacs-tricks-7-do-not-...

Re: Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client?

#18

Post by RobGR »

antirez wrote: post #9
antirez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm going to use this for some week. Mutt -> Gmail -> Sup ? I hope so.

After the first 10 minutes of testing, imported my gmail account, wrote few test emails, I don't think this is really read for prime time. Also does not play well with my messing with my IMAP account via other clients. Is slower than gmail since for some reason the IMAP account is accessed to retrieve messages when I open a thread. Btw to be able to write new emails with vim again is a joy... Still almost everything…

As a stop-gap measure, you might find that one of the extensions or plugins that let's you edit text boxes in a browser using vim or emacs would help in using gmail.

Re: Ask HN: Best Command Line Email Client?

#19

Post by antirez »

RobGR wrote: post #18
antirez wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the first 10 minutes of testing, imported my gmail account, wrote few test emails, I don't think this is really read for prime time. Also does not play well with my messing with my IMAP account via other clients. Is slower than gmail since for some reason the IMAP account is accessed to retrieve messages when I open a thread. Btw to be able to write new emails with vim again is a joy... Still almost everything…

As a stop-gap measure, you might find that one of the extensions or plugins that let's you edit text boxes in a browser using vim or emacs would help in using gmail.

Yes I used to have one of this extensions, don't remember the name but was capable of editing with Vim all the textarea elements in every web page. To switch between firefox and xterm was not very comfortable at least with my window manager. What I could like more is an extension that can give vim features to the browser text area.

Btw there is something strange going on here: the textarea is the most popular text editor out there, the most used one where millions of people write short and long text every day, and still browser developers are not realizing that it should be improved.

Post reply on HN