less is more? blahonga.
[back to index]

Thu Oct 18 22:41:52 CEST 2007

Gnus

--

Since  like way back when, I've been fascinated with GNUS, one of
the many emacs mail clients. Gnus was originally written to  read
news, but apparently it works well with imap.

Well, I really liked the idea. This was like in 1999? 2001? and I
downloaded the code, loaded up emacs... and immediately got  com-
pletely  stuck.  I had no idea how to get it running. I was tired
of pine, and needed something good to replace it  with.  Netscape
Mail  was  ok,  but...  it  felt  like such a resource hog, and I
couldn't run it inside of a screen-session  either.  And  pine...
well,  it  worked,  but  it  just didnt have the possibilities of
gnus...

While I was fidgeting with the conf over the next week or two  in
my  free  time, I discovered a MUA called mutt. And fell in love.
Man mutt rules! Everything is configurable, and it was quick  and
sleek...  as  long  as  you  didnt try to look in another folder,
which took forever. And getting an overview of all  your  folders
was also a bit of a pita.

Enter muttng. Muttng cached the headers, making switching folders
a quick thing, and it also lets you see all your folders  on  the
right side of the terminal. VEry nice.

But, when I switched to ubuntu a year back, I was stumped since I
for some reason couldn't get mutt to work in the terminal.  Or...
well  it  worked,  but  looked  like  crap. And I couldnt get the
swedish characters to  display,  alternatively  I  couldnt  enter
swedish  characters  so  that it looked ok in the recipients MUA.
Bah. I eventually fixed this, but in the meantime I used thunder-
bird  alot.  Quite  a nice interface, reminds me lots of netscape
mail. But its a gui application, and not very easy  to  use  with
only a keyboard.

So,  for  the last year or so I've been using muttng and thunder-
bird. And now... well I've found myself yearning for a good emacs
mail client.

Perhaps I should give GNUS a try again?


--