After the silence...GNUS!

I wish I could say there is a gap in publishing because of something _super important_ happening, but nopes.

There's one thing in my last config commit, and it's been a while brewing, and that is (drum roll please!) now I'm reading my email from Emacs! To no one's surprise I guess. I had the time to sit down and configure it, and just did.

The story so far

When I got this laptop, I made an effort of configuring things to be as touch-friendly as possible, imagining I would sit on the couch with the laptop folded and reading my email, the news, etc. By the way, I configured touch setups in i3 and in Gnome, and in the latter, with more than one email client.

But at the end of the day, it just never took off. When you end up unfolding the laptop for every other task, or the email clients aren't touchy enough, the workflow never sticks entirely. So for the last couple months I was looking at tutorials and setups to do this in Emacs, but not quite sure to make the leap.

Why Gnus?

Two reasons: it is built-in, and it doesn't have external dependencies and it is (allegedly) easy to configure. Although others claim it is too hard to configure.

Built-in

I've been trying to lean more and more on built-in packages. Rarely didn't I have internet access to download things from MELPA, and there are a few external packages I couldn't live without. But I _lean_ as much as I can in built ins, because Emacs really has it all included, and built-ins have a deeper integration between them than it seems on the surface. Some weird Emacs defaults start making sense when you go built-in.

Easy to configure & no dependencies

The no dependencies thing is partly a consequence of running Silverblue, of course I can layer packages or run them in a Toolbox, but better if I don't need to.

The other part of it is that by being self-contained within Emacs, Gnus allowed me to add a single use-package declaration in my init.el, not requiring other "dot-files". Oh, and also Gnus has good support for HTML emails and attachments.

So, how was it really?

The people who say Gnus is easy to configure are...right? It was a breeze, if overwhelming to start with. But after peeking at Emacs Wiki and a few Reddit posts, I was connecting to my server. Whatever extra time I spent in this endeavour (about a 5 hs or so) where more in tuning settings and reading more about Gnus and configuring extra things. The actual email reading/replying can be done in about an hour, and probably less. I also created a quick cheatsheet in howm that I can refer to for some bindings.

That's the part that is undeniable, while Gnus is not hard to use, it is arcane and somewhat convoluted. But you can focus on small things one at a time and be ready to email, like I said, pretty quickly.

What's next

Well, something I was thinking about after setting up this blog with commands to publish from Emacs, is that I could use spell checking in here. And now with emails also being composed via Emacs, this is more important. So I'm guessing today or tomorrow I will configure this.

The next portion is calendar, but that's an integration that will wait a couple more weeks/months.

(typed 03:45:58 PM~04:55:51 PM)