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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

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

There is a perverse kind of joy in making it work the hard way.

This is one of two honest answers to this question, thank you.

(The other is "I'm old enough to have been using text email since before graphical email clients were a thing and don't want to change.")

There's also another. Navigating TUI with Vim key bindings is very fast

i seriously doubt that its faster than the normal keyboard bindings and mouse. and i enable vim mode in any editor i use.

and even if it were the truth: navigating mail generally consumes the least time... actually reading the mail and deciding what to do about it takes way longer. another activity where a scroll wheel is invaluable.

>navigating mail generally consumes the least time... actually reading the mail and deciding what to do about it takes way longer

Depends on the kind of email you receive.

> There's also another. Navigating TUI with Vim key bindings is very fast

I'm a heavy VIM user. Gmail supports VIM keybindings and there exist VIM keybinding extensions for all popular web browsers, i.e. Vimperator on Firefox.:wq

Many years ago, a mail reader, whose name temporarily eludes me, touted as one of its features that for the most common use case it could be driven with just two fingers on the numeric keypad, one for the enter key (which paged down and went to the next message) and one for the Del/. key (which skipped threads).

Perfectly describes the kind of people that go all CLI :D

Graphical email clients are universally buggy and slow. That's the advantage of mutt.

That said, I still find Thunderbird better than mutt, even though it takes ages to do anything and crashes 3 times a day.

> Graphical email clients are universally buggy and slow. That's the advantage of mutt.

that's what they said back in the early 2000s too, so I tried it, but I was appalled by the horrible support for message threading and IMAP support that was missing most of the features you'd expect an IMAP client to have plus the stuff that was there was full of bugs.

I'm sure this has gotten better by now, but a blanket statement of "Graphical clients are buggy" is totally not valid. All software has bugs and depending on your priorities some might be worse than others.

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.

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