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by mtlmtlmtlmtl 1348 days ago
It brings joy to my heart to still see these simple web 1.0 pages.

And the front page has almost all the information I care about as a terminal luddite: vim bindings, etc.

One point of criticism: it says extensible, but it's not very clear how exactly it's extensible. What language is used for extensions? Go? Scripts + conf files with hooks? The front page makes no mention, nor does the source page, and I've yet to find it by clicking around the wiki.

1 comments

aerc is plugged into your surrounding Unix environment more deeply than most mail clients. It has a keybindings system which is like a more generalized version of Vim, plus an embedded terminal emulator and support for piping things through shell commands, and a templating system.

Example: to apply git patches, I have this in ~/.config/aerc/binds.conf:

    ga = :flag<Enter>:pipe -mb git am -3<Enter>
To reply to thank the contributor, I have this:

    rt = :unflag<Enter>:reply -a -Tthanks<Enter>
The "thanks" template invoked by this shells out to git to include a summary of the git push and set a special mail header to update the mailing list on the status of the patch:

    X-Sourcehut-Patchset-Update: APPLIED
    
    Thanks!
    
    {{exec "{ git remote get-url --push origin; git reflog -2 origin/master --pretty=format:%h | xargs printf '%s\n' | tac; } | xargs printf 'To %s\n   %s..%s  master -> master'" ""}}
Hope that helps.
That does help, thank you.

I like this because I could do the script parts in whatever language I like.

I've been trying to cobble together a linux dev system that's almost entirely configured in lisp.

Getting pretty close now, in theory, with Guix for a distro(Guile initscripts and system def), Stumpwm(Common Lisp), Nyxt-browser(also CL), and of course Emacs with evil-mode for editing/org-mode.

I realise I could Emacs all the things, but I have too much of a love-hate relationship with Emacs for that to be bearable...

What do you hate about Emacs?
I don't particularly like Elisp as a lisp, but I still prefer it by miles to Vimscript which I find revolting. And I find that a lot of packages for using emacs for things like IRC, email etc tend to be quite buggy. If you spend some time on any Lisp/Emacs related IRC channel, you'll see a steady backround noise of people disconnecting due to ERC crashes. In addition, Emacs tends to have pretty hit or miss documentation outside of vanilla Emacs.

There's so much outdated crap floating around on sites like Emacswiki recommending a bunch of buggy, slow packages for things that have been added to vanilla Emacs years ago.

And in general I find that the more stuff I stuff into my Emacs config, the more weird interactions are possible between various packages and the more bloated and unmaintable it gets, breaking in all sorts of annoying ways when Emacs is updated.

So I try to keep Emacs limited to what it (IMO) does better than anything else: development and org-mode.

There's the saying that Emacs is a great OS, but a terrible editor. I think it's a terrible OS with a fantastic editor.