💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 8-13.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:55:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Terminal email clients are still cool
Terminals are still pretty central to my day-to-day: I use Linux via wsl at work, switched to fish at my (much-younger) colleagues' suggestion, found it easy and intuitive and a little bit faster than bash for how I use it.
And so I agree with everything cda writes on his microblog regarding terminal email clients - like a lot of people, my usual usage is one of the usual big suspects (GMail occasionally, but mostly Outlook). Here at tilde.club, I switch between mutt and alpine, though usually the latter. pine was my first email client and I loved it. It was simple and easy to use and fine.
alpine is a rewrite? continuation? of pine and it's fine for what I use it for, which in tildeland is replying to the occasional email. I was thinking a bit about why it didn't quite feel like pine and what I was missing, and came to the conclusion that it had to do with all the additional context of modern computing. At the time when I first used pine, almost thirty years ago, I was using Telix to dial up an ISP. All this was being displayed full screen on my old monochrome monitor. Now, I'm connecting to a tilde in putty with a bunch of applications littering the desktop behind it. I can maximize the terminal, but the taskbar is still there. We live in the land of compression and notification and distraction.
Maybe that's a bit of why people get into retro-computing. It's a lot of fun to dive back into things that used to hold our wonder, but it's also interesting to go back to a time when tasks were handled one at a time, when there were fewer distractions, more focus. At least for me. I didn't have a multitasking environment until the late 90s, getting by for a long time on a very outdated PC from the mid 80s. But something about the text-based environment of BBSs (my first online experience) moved seamlessly over to my first internet experience, via diaup at 2400, with lynx, and pine, and tin, websites and emails and newsgroups taking up the entirety of my screen. So, yeah. Even if I use Outlook for almost everything, I'll always come back to (al)pine. It feels like home.