Installing Aerc on Slackware

Page created: 2023-08-05 , updated: 2023-08-11

Back to my Slackware pages. See also: Using Aerc!

Aerc caught my eye quite a while ago with its promise of TUI email heaven:

Vim-style keybindings and general keyboard-driven interface.
Built-in terminal emulator so you can use the editor of your choice without leaving the email client!
Async IMAP support.

Installing

Step 1 is to install the "real" Google Go. Slackware comes with the gcc-go package, but that gave me errors while attempting to compile.

I recommend installing the pre-built binary unless you really enjoy watching your computer compile things. Here are my instructions for installing Go on Slackware.

With the right version of Go installed, compiling Aerc and installing it was painless.

Oh, you’ll also need scdoc to build manpages. There’s a Slackbuild for that and it’s a tiny package:

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/system/scdoc/

With go and scdoc, it’s compile time:

$ wget https://git.sr.ht/~rjarry/aerc/archive/0.15.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xf aerc-0.15.2.tar.gz
$ cd aerc-0.15.2
$ less README.md
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ aerc -v
aerc 0.15.2 (go1.20.7 amd64 linux)

Done!

NOTE TO SELF: If I end up liking it as much as I think I will based on my initial impressions, I will probably end up making a SlackBuild for it.