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Meli email client, pre-alpha release
- tambourine_man 7y agoWe seem to be experiencing a renaissance of TUI software, particularly email clients[1] and I couldn’t be happier. Email and TUI are such a natural fit. Make it work with your favorite editor and most nerds will switch. [1] https://aerc-mail.org/ https://aerc-mail.org/
- capdeck 7y agoIn absolute agreement here. Even though mutt's shortcuts are hardwired into my brain, I always check the new-comers out - especially ones written in a language that compiles to binary. There is something lost in this world of shady docker containers, epic javascript runtimes and infinite universe of python environment versions.
- euske 7y agoI, for one, want a pure command line based email client, not just a TUI client, that is well integrated with bash/zsh in an everyday use, e.g. $ inbox (shows the first 10 emails in the inbox) $ search from:john (shows emails from john with numbers) $ reply 4 (opens up vi to edit a reply to the email #4) ... I've been dreaming a client like this for decades, and actually started developing it, but the development is stagnating for now (due to the spec changes and other priorities).
- dpifke 7y agoCheck out notmuch: https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/
- tambourine_man 7y agoI loved your take, haven’t thought of it that way, but it would be great. I hope you are able to go back to it.
- sipior 7y agoYou might find mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) interesting; it's not too far off from what you describe.
- KC8ZKF 7y agomail, pipes and grep?
- em-bee 7y agodid you look at nmh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System
- euske 7y agoActually, I was a big fan of MH. But it's quite old and full of gotchas. It doesn't have decent search functions either. Also I'd like to have something written in a modern scripting language (Python, JS, etc), as I don't want to worry about buffer overflow.
- obrajesse 7y agoIsn’t this mh?
- rout39574 7y agoyep
- waddlesplash 7y agoHaiku's mail system may be of interest to you -- the default UI is of course a GUI, but as the mails are stored as individual files, and their headers in extended attributes, you can use "query mail:from=john", etc. to filter mails, "mail" to send them, etc.
- marttt 7y agoYou might also like neatmail: https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail http://litcave.rudi.ir http://litcave.rudi.ir Or mother (and its, uh, "mother", nedmail) if you're a Plan9 person: http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/ http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/ http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/nedmail http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/nedmail
- sergiotapia 7y agoWhat is TUI
- vtail 7y agoText UI
- tambourine_man 7y agoSorry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface
- keyle 7y agoI'm a TUI nerd and I love them... But I've used terminal emails recently... and hum, 80% of my emails involved pictures.
- tambourine_man 7y agoThat and html only messages are a problem indeed. In macOS, however, it is trivial to pass it to quickview, which can display most anything.
- peteretep 7y agoOCR and image descriptions have come on leaps and bounds...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jethro_tell 7y agoSounds like a mailcap problem? You can tell your client how to open every file imaginable. With mutt, I use an ascii preview of the image so I can screen out signatures and then when I open an image, it opens with an image viewer. I have websites, pdfs, doc, xls files all dumped to a text preview mode, then open them in an appropriate viewer if I feel the need further investigation. Turns out most of the time, those emails boil down to pictures you don't need (like logos and b roll headers) and a few words. Most of the joy of terminal email for me is filtering out all the cruft and being left with words.
- dngray 7y agoYeah I saw this a while back https://drewdevault.com/2019/06/03/Announcing-aerc-0.1.0.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/06/03/Announcing-aerc-0.1.0.htm... He has a really nice video there demonstrating it. I wonder how it compares? I guess both are pretty alpha at the moment.
- stevekemp 7y agoI wrote a "replacement" for mutt, for my own needs a few years back - because I wanted to use a _real_ scripting language, rather than something that was not complete. The result was a client-core written in C++ with most of the UI setup and configuration handled via lua: https://github.com/lumail/lumail/ https://github.com/lumail/lumail/
- johnklos 7y agoRust. Non-portable bull. Sigh. I guess that's what makes for news on Hacker News.
- rolltiide 7y agoDo I like the delivery TLD? 4 syllables, doesn't roll off the tongue Ehhhh
- Ahmed90 7y agoWith all respect for the hard work done on this client, but is it just me or is the TUI getting too much attention recently?? I think the GUI stacks are too bloated or too hideous (electron, cpp/qt,c# and it's limitations, etc...) to work with these days so much that the cool kids (hardcore techy people) just gave up and started doing TUIs to solve their own problems directly?
- giancarlostoro 7y agoI think you've hit the nail on the head, I've thought about this as well. I think it's clear that UI's are a problem yet to be solved, which is why Electron took off. If you've got a website, you've got a GUI with Electron, and a looot of people know how to slap together some JS and HTML. I would love to see a language agnostic UI stack that can run across platforms, to an extent Electron is "language agnostic" since you write the UI in whatever language you want, you just then compile it to JS (and eventually WebAssembly).
- vnorilo 7y agoAs a thought experiment, how would the stack differ from Qt, which runs just about everywhere and has bindings for a huge range of languages?
- cricalix 7y agoThe one thing that always put me off of the Qt, Wx etc libraries is that it felt like you have to be fairly deep in the weeds with layouts. HTML + CSS ( + something like a framework perhaps for JS niceness) feels much easier, because the browser does the heavy work of laying out the elements for you, resizing them etc. Maybe I've just not sat down long enough to poke the UI work, but every time I have sat down it's felt like a huge effort to get a few text boxes and a data table to render and flow, whilst over in web land, it's a few input tags and a set of table tags in a loop, and then a smattering of CSS.
- vnorilo 7y ago
- mxuribe 7y agoMaybe its my age but I actually like TUI-style for something like email, because its less taxing on the eyes. Its funny, nowadays, either the UI of some apps/clients is way too busy/dsitracting, and colorful, and annoying...Or, its bare and tough to figure out (what does that icon do again?)...but not intuitive. Again, it could be my age...but i like the simplicity of TUI types of interfaces...at least for things like checking email.
- drinfinity 7y agoNo, I'm young-ish (33) and I agree. TUI's are just a very restricted type of GUI's. These restrictions make the devs focus on what is important, because there is literally no room for bullshit. These UI's pack more punch per pixel and thus make for a more productive experience - if you're so inclined. While I like true CLI TUIs, I can also live with TUI-like interface in the browser. I just like the style of them, the compactness, the cleanness. They will never go out of style. They are too productive.
- mxuribe 7y agoYeah, i think you said it best! Cheers!
- mxuribe 7y agoAlso, there is mention of a mastodon account to follow for further announcements...but wasn't clickable/didn't work...Anyone know what the account is? (By the way, cheers for participating on the fediverse, and not legacy silos!!)
- apatters 7y ago> one row per thread Woohoo! Hope this project gets a lot of love and support, because this has always been my preferred way to view threads. Can anyone recommend a more complete Linux mail client (TUI or GUI) that works this way, akin to Gmail's conversation view? Thunderbird theoretically can with some extensions but I've never quite managed to get it to work right. My other issue with switching to a TUI mail client would be that piping html mail to w3m and replying to it in plaintext (or writing html by hand in response) just never seemed robust enough to deal with a wide cross section of office worker humanity and their image/formatting/table-laden mails... Ah well, a man can dream.
- yakubin 7y ago> My other issue with switching to a TUI mail client would be that piping html mail to w3m and replying to it in plaintext (or writing html by hand in response) just never seemed robust enough to deal with a wide cross section of office worker humanity and their image/formatting/table-laden mails... Ah well, a man can dream. In my experience, lynx is superior for this task. You can use this line in your ~/.mailcap: text/html; lynx -stdin -dump -force_html -width 70; copiousoutput; description=HTML Text; test=type lynx >/dev/null
- cycomanic 7y agoI've you're using notmuch astroid is an excellent client. Fast responsive gui, but totally controllable with the keyboard.
- sthottingal 7y agoA big disadvantage with TUI based email clients is it can only work with English or latin script based languages. Complex scripts(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_text_layout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_text_layout) does not render properly in terminals.
- Fnoord 7y agoThat might be a big disadvantage for you; it is a feature I don't miss at all. Mutt supports UTF-8, and that's all I need.
- _delirium 7y agoThis depends on the terminal. Konsole, mlterm, and Apple's Terminal.app can do complex text layout. Recent versions of Emacs support a modern text-shaping engine, Harfbuzz, when run in GUI mode, which is another option for emacs-based mail clients. I guess it's maybe not technically a TUI in this case, but emacs mail clients are still very TUI-like, even when run in non-terminal emacs.
- owen11 7y agoHow to compile it on Ubuntu? I am getting 'make: * No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.' when I run 'make' and there is no configure file. Also, I can't figure out a way to sign up to https://git.meli.delivery https://git.meli.delivery so I can create an 'issue.
- pauldino 7y agoThe cargo.toml file gives it away as a Rust project, so install Rust then > cargo build to just compile, or > cargo run to compile & run
- littlestymaar 7y ago> cargo build --release Otherwise you'd be compiling it in debug mode (which is really slow for most projects).
- skarlso 7y agoIs everyone forgetting about mutt (http://www.mutt.org/ http://www.mutt.org/) being a thing?
- Legogris 7y agoI'm pretty sure anyone trying an experimental terminal-based e-mail client has already tried mutt. Personally, the flow never suited me. I'll probably give aerc a try soon.
- em-bee 7y agoi used mutt for many years. i even used to hang out with mutts creator. but when i discovered sup with its tag based virtual folders and the ability to keep state in multiple buffers at once i never looked back. i'll look at aerc and meli once they support notmuch...
- jabbernotty 7y agoFYI: The images don't show up on Firefox 60.7.2esr (which is the version that Debian carries).
- zevv 7y agoNo one mentioning Alot? https://github.com/pazz/alot https://github.com/pazz/alot https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://alot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Alot is a terminal-based mail user agent for the notmuch mail system. It features a modular and command prompt driven interface to provide a full MUA experience as an alternative to the Emacs mode shipped with notmuch.
- GrumpyNl 7y agoGet a weird ssl error when trying to load the site. SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
- ktpsns 7y agoFirefox refuses to connect to this HTTPS URL: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
- Fnoord 7y agoMy Firefox works on this HTTPS URL
- aorth 7y agoI'm getting a Secure Connection Failed error in Firefox (11:54:34 UTC): > An error occurred during a connection to meli.delivery. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
- joyjoyjoy 7y agoI don't see a feature list. Does it support several different IMAP/POP emails?
- joyjoyjoy 7y agoThis was on HN last year but nothing has come out of it: http://www.ivelope.com/invite/RunItUpTheFlagpoleHackerSeaChange http://www.ivelope.com/invite/RunItUpTheFlagpoleHackerSeaCha...