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> It's an Electron app, but it is built to use as little RAM as possible, when I run it on my old Macbook Air, it consumes only around 300mb of RAM maximum

I feel bad but you have already lost me there :/

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That is maximum, normal is around 130 - 170 mb

I think the point is that it's better to have something using the native widgets of your OS if possible. It carries much less footprint and it integrates with your OS much more nicely in the end. Webapps running in Electron is just becoming too commonplace.

That also means building a separate UI for every supported OS, which isn't usually feasible for a single developer.

https://qt.io

Just an fyi, it looks like you need to include the www for the link to load.

Qt also isn't truly native (it renders its own UI components) and shares many of Electron's drawbacks, so it's only marginally better (and means you have to learn an entirely new platform if you're already familiar with web dev).

> marginally better

Not in terms of resources (CPU/RAM). It's way better than Electron.

I've done it.

I didn't say it's impossible (I've also done it), but for something that's not a full-time job/project, it's a lot of extra work that could be avoided by simply using Electron, especially if you are already familiar with web development but don't have any experience with any of the native platforms.

But the poster did say this was a full-time project.

And I don't believe that only having experience in web development is a good enough excuse for shoehorning web dev things everywhere else.

You're right, I missed the OP saying that. But I still disagree: prior experience with a platform is a great reason for using it. Maybe not for a company with lots of resources, like Slack or Microsoft, but definitely for a small team or individual developer. Any time you would have spent learning a new development platform can instead be spent building new features!

How much RAM does your mail client use?

I use notmuch with Emacs - so very little.

Before that I used mutt - also very little.

Does that support HTML email and images? If not, it seems like a different domain entirely. Other people in this thread have posted Thunderbird numbers and they're in the ballpark. After all, it is rendered in Gecko similarly to how ivelope is rendered in Electron.

Not directly. You can configure w3m to display HTML email, and it does a nice job within the constraints of text mode. Most normal mail, even with tables, renders well. If you get something really crazy you can pipe the message to a graphical web browser to view.

Native Emacs in a GUI can also show inline images (but not when running in a terminal, obviously).

Remote images in email is an anti-feature[0]. And if the images are attached to the email, why not just use an image viewer? Does your email client support video playback?

[0]: https://senglehardt.com/papers/pets18_email_tracking.pdf

That's fine, but there's no point comparing RAM usage between completely different apps like video players and email clients.

Because sometimes discussion centers in and around the images, as in discussion of analysis figures.

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