Aerc (mail client)
See also: Installing Aerc (on Slackware)
I’ve just started learning Aerc, but my initial impressions are extremely favorable. So far, this is one of the most polished and well-designed TUI programs I’ve seen. I was reading mail in just minutes after installing!
Three weeks later: I’m still doing anything complicated in Claws-Mail or Thunderbird (especially related to attachments). But I’ve started reading and responding to most email messages with Aerc.
If anything, I’m even more impressed with it as I use it.
Here’s the stuff I’ve learned so far. Like vi/Vim, the keyboard shortcuts are case-sensitive:
-
Type
?(Shift+/) to view a cheatsheet of keyboard options. -
Move up and down the message list box with
jandk. -
Move up and down the IMAP folder list with
JandK. -
Hit
Enterto view a selected message. -
Hit
qto exit out of a message or Aerc itself. -
Delete a message with
D(ordandEnterat the prompt). -
Reply (with quoted text) with
R q(R then q, not at the same time). -
Switch "tabs"
Ctrl+n(works even while in Vim, which took me by surprise one day).
I love that keybinding is so each to change. I pretty much always want to do
reply-all, quoted for 99% of the emailing I do. So I re-bound that to just r
in both the message list and view modes in .config/aerc/binds.conf. So this
line shows up in two places and I commented out the other reply types:
r = :reply -aq<Enter>
(I also changed the 'A' binding to :archive year, keep reading.)
Setting up IMAP message archiving
Now I want to get Aerc to archive email in the
Archives/<year> format that Thunderbird used.
The first part is to change the default folder name from Archive to
Archives. That’s done in accounts.conf:
$ cat ~/.config/aerc/accounts.conf [Ratf] source = <redacted> outgoing = <redacted> default = INBOX from = <redacted> copy-to = Sent archive = Archives
The second is to make the year style the default for key binding:
$ cat archive ~/.config/aerc/binds.conf ... [messages] A = :archive year<Enter> ... [view] A = :archive year<Enter>
The other thing I needed was to recompile Aerc from the current master instead of from the latest release. The CHANGELOG.md shows:
* IMAP now uses the delimiter advertised by the server ... * :archive now works on servers using a different delimiter
That work was done just three months ago. I love to see the active support from multiple committers as Aerc closes in on sweet perfection!
(I believe my mail provider (runbox.com) uses a '.' delimiter rather than '/'.)
Conclusion
I’m still just an Aerc noob and sometimes I switch over to claws-mail or Thunderbird to do more complicated things (like deal with file attachments).
I’ll come back here and update this page once I’ve got some more usage under by belt.