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Comment by feanaro | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you are implying. That it is hard? It is only a single line added to the `mailcap` file:

    text/html; firefox '%s' &; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; needsterminal;

After that's in place, you simply open attachments (via `view-attachments`) and call `view-attach` (usually via a key binding) on the HTML attachment.

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You just used the word “simply” in the same was as you used the word “just”.

The argument GP was making is that what is obvious to one reader may not be obvious to another. So using the words “simply” or “just” or “obviously” does not add information, except to signal that you feel the reader is ignorant if they are not aware of what you’re explaining.

My PhD advisor always crossed these words out of my scientific writing, and I think it was a good change to make.

Strangely, that's entirely the opposite of what I understood from the original comment. To me, "you can just use XXX" sounds like someone just told me that "all you need is XXX; don't worry it's simple". The assumption is that the HN'er saying it and the HN'er being said to share an implicit level of expertise since we are all talking about mutt here.

That's exactly how I meant it, FWIW.

Fair point. It does probably make sense to just strip the words out in this case as well.

I do want to point out that I didn't use those words fully consciously and I most certainly did not mean to imply the reader was ignorant. The only thing those words were signalling is that the action in question does not take much effort (once you know it).

To add to what you are saying, here is a short article highlighting which words should be avoided: https://css-tricks.com/words-avoid-educational-writing/

> The argument GP was making is that what is obvious to one reader may not be obvious to another.

Regardless of the argument, it's not obvious to anyone unless they've taken the time to read the documentation and possibly read through some examples. While there are those who may feel that it's simple and/or obvious after they have gained that knowledge, it shouldn't relieve anyone of the responsibility to read documentation and figure these things out for any tool that they use.

For anyone currently using a GUI mail client where HTML mail works out of the box, this is not something they will spend time figuring out before concluding that HTML mails just don't work. And this is a complete non-starter for those who like Mutt on the basis of having something that also works in non-graphical environments.

That's fair enough, but this is why I'm not recommending this to someone who is not willing to spend half a minute searching for this one-liner. I'd also wager that the intersection of such people with the people who would even consider using Mutt in the first place is basically empty.

My point is that if you don't have those two constraints, it's trivial to do and it works perfectly.

That's fine when you run mutt on your local machine, but the whole reason to use mutt is so that you have a dedicated email machine that you can ssh into and use screen to access email from anywhere. And then things like this become 10x harder (I never found a way, although last I tried was 15+ years ago). Attachments, too.

That's certainly a valid reason to use mutt, but this is not at all why I use. I use because I prefer keyboard control, customizability and a simple, clean UI. Also because it's actually the least sucky (IMO) of local email clients.

One of my main reasons for using Mutt is precisely the opposite: with mbsync I have copies of all emails on my laptop, so I can read, search, and compose emails when I don't have an internet connection.

While requiring X11 forwarding, maybe https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ with a framebuffer would fit the bill?

If mutt is accessing email via IMAP, why would you need a dedicated machine for accessing email?

Why would anyone use mutt when you can have 'local' (ie on a machine you ssh into) Maildirs? That's one of the selling points for using mutt. Imap sucks, it's just something we have to put up with for lack of something better, but I've never searched mail as fast as when I could just grep for what I needed.

I use Thunderbird and it's installed on multiple machines where I have it configured to access the same email account via IMAP. I never really had a problem with out of sync mail and searches are done locally on the machine rather than on the server. I don't have it configured to use Maildir, but the files that store messages are in plain text and I could use grep on them if I wanted to.

You probably don't want to risk the attack surface of a full browser by default. You can use something like this: text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

And then map a separate key when you are sure...

Presumably you could use Links (or some other console friendly web client).

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