Switching to the Mutt Email Client • Hacker News Board

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#241

Post by rekado » Sun, Jun 18, 2017, 10:00 PM UTC

szastupov wrote: post #102

rekado wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs is not just an editor and mention it next to vim or mutt indicates that you misunderstand what Emacs tries to be. Emacs gives you tight integration for everything that could possibly be represented as a buffer. Emacs is programmable glue between applications, a better "shell". The desire to do all things in Emacs is because Emacs lets you do it and because it reduces context switching. For more on why one would…

I get the point about Emacs being a OS, but don't you think it's kind of a dated clunky OS? Like "Mac OS 9" was, lacking memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Why would anyone want to be limited by technology when the rest of the world is moving forward?

I'm still using the GNU system as my OS :) But Emacs is a very important "sub-environment" in my OS; it has a very privileged position in the process tree, much like a browser.

Emacs lacks a couple of features and I think it's fair to say that this represents a limit, but I don't see "the rest of world [...] moving forward" in this area. I don't know of any other system that is as ambitious as Emacs, a system that embraces the overflowing kitchen sink and isn't content with just being called an editor.

Out of the box it's terrible, I give you that. Clunky and dated are too nice for describing the defaults. But underneath the extremely conservative and curmudgeon defaults lies a very flexible environment that cannot be approximated with a set of text applications running inside a terminal emulator. It's a pale shade of the same colour that made Lisp Machines so attractive.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#242

Post by daurnimator » Mon, Jun 19, 2017, 1:58 AM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #2

Console based mail-clients are very powerful and fast to use. I was a long-time mutt user before I started writing my own mail client, with complete scripting provided by Lua. Having a real scripting language allows a lot of useful features, at times using mutt felt a little bit too constrained, although it has a lot of features and is very very flexible in its own right: https://github.com/lumail/lumail

ooo, I didn't know about this. Prepare for a possible influx of bug reports and feature requests :)

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#243

Post by grive » Mon, Jun 19, 2017, 8:41 AM UTC

collyw wrote: post #38

grive wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Images are opened like any image on your system: by using an image viewer. For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.

Wouldn't it just be easier to use a graphical client that does that sort of thing by default?

I would, if I could have a few things:

* A good integration to the rest of my IDE. I need to save a chain of email as .mbox to `git am` them afterward. I have this workflow with mutt, I don't know which graphical email client would allow me to streamline this.

* In the same vein, I need to be able to use only my keyboard. I tried a little using a web client with vimperator. But the gmail interface wasn't really easy to use, I prefer using mutt properly configured.

* I also like writing my emails using VI. Having those keybindings is a proper crutch, but it's not there for text editing.

* Finally, it allows me to have a transient workspace. I can SSH on my main machine from wherever, do a `tmux attach`, and I have absolutely everything available: access to my emails, but also integration to my other tools for email analysis / processing.

This all stems from workflow derived from ancient practices, that's true. When I was starting in the industry I mostly used graphical tools. More and more however, I tend to rely on purely TUI tools. I have a few things that I can simply not give up anymore (grep, find, sed, awk, as well as full access to git).

I only use the web for accessing articles or content aggregator like Hacker News, as well as streaming music to block the open space. Ah, yes, patchwork remains web-based, I haven't really used pwclient. When I have time I will look into this.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#244

Post by uberchet » Mon, Jun 19, 2017, 1:44 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #237

uberchet wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue, in turn, that your experience, regardless of how many people were involved, is divergent from the way in which email itself is moving in the broader market of users. Images as links to something else, that require an additional step, are an inferior substitute to inline images. Here in 2017, it's possible to build an email that includes tables or screenshots or other rich media that exist as part of the em…

But where is this kind of email happening besides the spam box? The way you argue this should be common and hit me in the face every day no matter my resistance. What I see is that less and less fluff is added to emails. A lot of work emails don't even contain a footer anymore, less and less people actually use greeting formulas, in some regards the whole communication moved from emails to other media like social med…

Where? My inbox and outbox.

Obviously, people use email in different ways. This thread seems to have attracted a large number of people who exist in a text-only email world, but nearly every email I send or receive includes at least some rich formatting, and it's very common for us to include inline images of screenshots or other graphics as part of these emails.

And we're not web designers. We make project management software.

So: for me, mostly work email, though I certainly get no small number of personal mails with photos attached.

Again, that YOUR experience with email doesn't include rich text or inline images outside your spam folder doesn't mean those features are valuable and useful to other people.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#245

Post by uberchet » Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 1:35 PM UTC

morganvachon wrote: post #230

uberchet wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue that for most people who actually still use email for communication with peers, images and attachments are an afterthought. Are you actually convinced of that, or are you being inflammatory? Because, in 2017, it's hilariously far afield of most folks' email use patterns both at work and at home. Do you only ever communicate using text -- and plain text at that? I work for a small software company - ie…

I was under the impression that most software houses and tech startups migrated to Slack or similar group messaging long ago, which offers much better handling of attachments and collaboration. Email is still heavily used in government, mostly on Exchange servers, and I can see attachments being a big thing there (I work for local government and that's our setup). In the home consumer world, it's nearly all iMessage/…

I can only speak to my experience, but email is very very much a part of our world in our software company. It's WAY better than Slack or other IM/group chat tool for search and archiving later -- and, let's be honest, a WHOLE LOT of stuff gets decided in email, so that's pretty important.

With a distributed team, it's even moreso. Plus, since we're distributed, the idea of email-as-document (with rich formatting and inline images) is just that much more normal.

Re: Switching to the Mutt Email Client

#246

Post by wbl » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 2:17 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #146

u801e wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. I think a lot of email clients expect that t…

> Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline Actually, they don't. Most posts don't quote their parent at all, it's a unitary response to the full parent post. Which is what bottom-quoting does - it doesn't actually quote the parent post, it leaves it in for reference (which makes sense because email clients, unlike HN, ar…

Bottom quoting means you read the answer before the question, breaking the logical flow of conversation. Not trimming means the messages have a vast amount of text to skip over each time.