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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

We 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.

I, 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).

Check out notmuch:

https://notmuchmail.org/

I 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.

You might find mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) interesting; it's not too far off from what you describe.

mail, pipes and grep?

did you look at nmh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

Actually, 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.

Isn’t this mh?

yep

Haiku'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.

You might also like neatmail:

https://github.com/aligrudi/neatmail

http://litcave.rudi.ir

Or mother (and its, uh, "mother", nedmail) if you're a Plan9 person:

http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mother/

http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/nedmail

I 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/

Yeah I saw this a while back 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.

I'm a TUI nerd and I love them... But I've used terminal emails recently... and hum, 80% of my emails involved pictures.

That and html only messages are a problem indeed.

In macOS, however, it is trivial to pass it to quickview, which can display most anything.

OCR and image descriptions have come on leaps and bounds...

Sounds 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.

In 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.

What is TUI

Text UI

Sorry:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_user_interface

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