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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

I have used Emacs as my e-mail client for two decades now, namely Gnus. Gnus is no longer the best choice for many people, inasmuch as few still use Usenet (Gnus was conceived primarily as a newsreader), and you can get RSS feeds through the much more straightforward Emacs package Elfeed. If all one is using Gnus for is e-mail, then Gnus is slow and overcomplicated.

I myself thought about switching to Notmuch. The problem is that after 20 years, Gnus’s key bindings are burned into my muscle memory. It feels like it would be more hassle to switch to a different package and learn its interface than continue to use Gnus with all its flaws. Others here may have their own Emacs packages that they feel they can’t switch away from because these packages are so second-nature to them.

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I've used Emacs/GNUS for just shy of your two decades myself. It was Emacs/VM before that.

Note, you can incorporate notmuch into GNUS. From the groups buffer I type G G and type some search terms into the minibuffer and get a notmuch buffer of results. I can browse them and if I find one I want I can do C-c C-c to return to the GNUS buffer with threaded context of that message.

Do you think it's maybe time to move Gnus out of the Emacs core distribution and maintain it as a package in ELPA?

It feels wrong to me to be maintaining so much unnecessary code in the core distribution.

Gnus only got moved into Emacs core a couple of years ago. Lars got tired of supporting fourteen different Emacs versions, including XEmacs, and finally just tied it to core. The ELPA package repository is developing the concept of core-but-installable, whereby a package is shipped with core, but a newer version can be installed via ELPA, and that might be a viable path for Gnus.

I don't think the issue was needing Gnus in core, so much as it was avoiding all the multi-version support headache. But one could simply declare that the package is only supported for the two most recent Emacs versions, for instance, and call it good.

No. The core distribution isn't that big, and I like how it contains features that harken back to an earlier era – it acts as a sort of history museum on matters that younger programmers might like to learn about.

It's well over a million lines of elisp, which is not small. But it's certainly not much disk space.

same. i was a huge Gnus user. the combination of email and usenet was nice. a bygone era.

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