Emailing in Emacs is a super power that I have been grateful for over the past several years. Below I will describe a simple setup that works for me and more importantly for me, it’s something I like. This setup makes me almost want to write descriptive emails simply because it moves the pain of writing emails into the same ecosystem that I feel comfortable writing long form articles, programs, design documents and other artifacts that involve “putting my thoughts down”. I cringe everytime I see an email written in rich text with broad lines going well over 150 characters.
It may not be for me – in fact, it’s really not for me – but I always greatly enjoy reading about people’s unique way of doing things with hardware and software.
That just took me 20 years down memory lane 🙂
While i have personally long since moved on, it is cool to see that some programs* live on for so many years relatively unchanged (not to be confused with being stagnant)
The stab at rich text is silly though, if you manually fiddle with line lengths while writing, then you are doing something wrong, and if you see waaay too long lines when viewing rich text, you probably need a better client for viewing it.
I used to try to cram everything into one tool too, until i eventually realized that it was usually not the best for any specific part, and for a lot of tasks, the tool is really not all that important and i should stop fiddling with it and just get stuff done instead.
For WRITING an email, emacs, notepad, word, outlook, text area in a browser, they all allow me to write the same content in about the same time. For reading / managing emails there are of course differences between solutions. I love gmail because i could largely stop fiddling with trying to organize stuff and putting stuff in folders since the search is so good, so i actually save time. I dislike outlook / exchange specifically because the search is not good enough to pull that off.
*) or operating systems or death stars or whatever emacs actually should be classified as
Everyone knows vi is way better.
jal_,
Everyone knows vim is improved.
I really don’t understand the comment about “broad lines going well over 150 characters”. This is 2020, most people are using graphical e-mail clients that don’t needlessly insert line breaks in the middle of a sentence or paragraph. Is it really so difficult to turn soft line wrapping on for the e-mail use case?
Moochman,
Similar debate here:
http://www.osnews.com/story/130891/ibm-sonic-delay-lines-and-the-history-of-the-80×24-display/
It’s not just 2020, even in the 1990s fixed line lengths like 72 or 80 chars had become an obsolete archaic convention that made little sense. Best to let the software auto-wrap the text to whatever size is required rather than make it compulsory for users to do it manually.
Ha, and yet yamllint still complains if a line is too long 😛
In YAML line breaks have an actual meaning, and the files are for use exclusively in fixed-width display IDEs. So it makes a lot more sense in that case.