I acquired a new gmail address (calm down, Google haters! :-) ) for a few reasons, one being wanting to see if I could hook it up to "mutt". Success attained - although, oh, the hoops, how old men can't jump, etc.....
Of course, there's too often endless misery to software. tmux seems to be the culprit in messing up terminal colors for mutt (from what I read it's something to do with how tmux mucks with the TERM environment variable), so I'll be damned if I could get it to display the way I'd really want. But I found some .tmuxrc settings that make it visibly passable, despite nonsensical. Until I figured the latter out, I was actually using a script that ran a tmux command to capture pane text, put that in a temp file, and "less"ing that file in order to see the text. Ugh....
Don't ask me to describe how I made mutt/gmail work, because I couldn't tell you for the steps seeming so convoluted due to documentation "run around", unsatisfying terminology, and then how our T-mobile "5G" device and my Chromebook were conspiring to manifest DNS flakiness issues that I still can't figure out. That kind of hoop/poop -age generally leads to my not really remembering what I did through all the M steps forward, N steps back, another Q steps sideways, etc., and that's regardless how carefully/meticulously I take notes.
I thought I'd fixed that networking thing several times (e.g. re-enabling ipv6, flushing ip tables, running "ping google.com" in one tmux pane while trying to do useful things requiring networking in another, restarting the Chromebook...), but it always turned out to be dumb luck masquerading as problem solved.
Of course, I've hardly anyone to email anyway, but part of the goal was to have a path to acknowledging others' good writing work in http[s]/gopher/gemini/usenet places. For all of "smol"net's seeming glorification of people remaining interactively aloof, being acknowledged still matters to me, and can't help but believe to others despite their needing to play "tough <gender>" about it publicly.
Or maybe they truly *are* that detached, in which case I'm gosh danged impressed.
~lacklustre_saint wrote (thread):
You're hardly the first to struggle with colors in the terminal. I actually found a nice post about terminal colors that helped me out https://chadaustin.me/2024/01/truecolor-terminal-emacs/
I've thought of going to the hyper-efficient, low-frictopn route of a ChroneOS device with a Google Fi SIM inside (SIM acquired, awaiting my phone to be "released" from Cricket Wireless). The Chrome device would be a Chromebook Duet 3 from Lenovo, a tablet/"laptop" deal. And then making the thing full Ubuntu, as Amoroso and others on Mastodon have shown how to effectively activate full Linux (in Chromes case, Ubuntu) on a ChromeOS device. I messed with "Linux (beta)" stuff on ChromeOS in 2020, but want to use it that way full tilt.
Of course I will not do most/any of this. Sticking with Debian on the HP14, or FreeBSD when I have the FREE time (haha) to fuck with it. The fi SIM will go in a Nighthawk router sometime.
Always wanting things simple