It does get easy to read, but then you unlock a deeper level of misery which is trying to work out the semantics. Stuff like implicit type conversions, remembering the rule of 3 or 5 to avoid your std::moves secretly becoming a copy, unwittingly breaking code because you added a template specialization that matches more than you realized, and a million others.
This is correct - it does get easy to read but you are constantly considering the above semantics, often needing to check reference or compiler explorer to confirm.
Unless you are many of my coworkers, then you blissfully never think about those things, and have Cursor reply for you when asked about them (-:
I tried setting up mu4e once. It wasn’t worth it. It took me literally a few hours of reading random blog posts to figure out the configuration, and that was only to download email. Never got around to setting up sending them, which is a totally separate process. Even then, there were lots of issues. First, it’s slow. Loading an email had a noticeable pause and was slower than GMail. Also, you can’t avoid HTML email nowadays. There’s a very basic render, but expect all the formatting to be wrong. I also ran into rate limits from Google because we get way too much email at work. That’s not mu4e’s fault, but just another obstacle. Can’t really have my inbox be one hour behind real time.
I have been using mu4e for years, and am generally happy with it, and yet... I've never recommended it to anyone else. Unlike, say, org-mode or magit, which I'd happily evangelize.
The pain points are what other commenters have said:
- I don't find the default config a good fit for me, and run it heavily customized. As someone said everything in Emacs turns into a project...
- Performance can be an issue, especially indexing new mail (and especially if you like to lug around a copy of most of your emails locally as I do). On a laptop while traveling this used to be more of a problem, but newer versions are notieably quicker and newer laptops have better battery life.
- HTML rendering isn't great. Thankfully I don't get too many important messages that isn't just plain text. This might be a reasonable use case for xwidget-webkit though I'd imagine there are security/privacy issues to work out. (Another Emacs project -- yay!)
When I started I thought it would be an efficient way to get through lots of emails, and it has been for the most part. I'm just not sure I've saved time overall unless one counts the hours configuring it as "entertainment / hobby" rather than "work".
I too am a bit surprised this made it on the front page. Mu4e is definitely niche, and I wouldn't crow about it like I do org or magit. I've only been using it for less than a month and it will be a while before I know whether it is a net win.
Also, the real test would have been my much more voluminous work email!
The HTML rendering isn't great, as you said, but you are two keystrokes from opening that email in a browser, if you have to.
And I have tweaked the config several times now, but I think that's mostly because I'm changing my (and the charity's) email, which involves a lot of shuffling about. Again, in six months, I'll have another look and decide whether it _really_ helped.
This was my second attempt to get email working on Emacs and I gave up the first time, too. I persisted this time and I _think_ it will pay off. There is the obvious danger of this becoming another "project", but I'll make a note to check-in again in six months. It's an experiment!
I've not seen the other things you mentioned. I only check for email every 10 minutes, but opening and (especially) searching for emails seem much faster than doing it in Gmail. Plus, I can do searches across email accounts, like all unreads across all three accounts. That was definitely slower in the online clients.
Finally, there's a quick ('a' then 'v') way to just open a message in a browser if the HTML is too thick.
I use notmuch for email in emacs. I use w3m to process HTML emails for viewing in text, it does a pretty good job especially with tables, which are still used a lot in HTML email.
And the search.... fantastic. Best email search and virtual folder capability I've used on any platform.
The biggest tip is to read fun books. Pick up an easy dumb page turner like The Da Vinci Code, and reading won’t be a chore. Save the non-fiction and literary fiction for when you get more in the habit. Also, it’s ok to give up on a book if it’s not interesting.
I'm going to second this: if a book doesn't grip you and get you to be curious, then this indicated it is badly written (applies to both fiction and nonfiction). Give yourself permission to skim books or stop reading halfway - life is too short to read something that's not enjoyable or useful.
I was on the same boat as you. The “Learn Fusion 360 in 30 Days” series on YouTube is awesome. In the first video you make a working Lego brick, and after a couple of hours I could make my own simple parts. Complex objects still seem hard, but simple household 3D prints turned out to be easier than expected. I started with OnShape but switched to Fusion just so I could follow this tutorial. I think (hope) the skills will be pretty transferable to any CAD.
Amazing write up! Everyone at work is itching to try Rust, but I think what’s killing adoption is that it’s not very clear how to gradually transition a code base. We have a few million lines of C++, some of it written 25 years ago. A full rewrite is just out of the question, at best we could use it for new sections. This is super common in the c++ world, so it’s a pity that porting wasn’t a first class concern in rust considering C++ devs are the target audience. It sounds like it was a challenge even at 57k LOC. Congrats to the fish team though, great accomplishment!
If you codebase isn't somewhat modern C++(C++11) I would start there before concidering a port to rust. It will be a significantly easier upgrade in safety even if not going all the way to rusts level of safety.
Generally code that has been running for years is unlikely to have too many bugs since they have been shaken out, "rewrite it in Rust" as a fad just ignores the decades of work already put into the codebase and for large codebases likely eont succeed.
As you mentioned, write new modules with rust. That means likely needing to export a C API for your libraries but there's a good chance you were already doing that. There was also a rust crate that tried to automate most of the c++ rust interop for you but not sure about how good it is in reality.
There was some article about it on HN a while ago. If I remember right the problem was that its bioavailability is super low. You can take all you want, but only a tiny percent makes it through to get absorbed. In theory you could increase the the dose a lot but I imagine that might have other issues.
I believe the problem is that the oral route causes most of it to be broken down in the digestive system. Nasal spray seems to be more effective because it has a chance to directly enter the blood stream rather than go through the gut.
Many negative comments here, but the notion that food might be less nutritious is certainly interesting and worth exploring, even if this article isn’t the end all be all. As mentioned in there, apples are sold up to a year old, and I know the same is done with potatoes. We have global issues with soil quality and depth, produce is selected for transport instead of taste (which is why grocery store tomatoes are gross but garden tomatoes are amazing) and other practices like breeding chicken that grow twice as fast as they used to.
In the past 3 weeks I blocked, no exaggeration, about 350 of these same text messages. They’re almost all for republican fundraisers, and almost always either unscrupulous or borderline fraudulent. Stuff like “50X match if you donate now!”, or “our records indicate you’re voting for Kamala. Click now to set the record straight!”. Sending “Stop” or marking as spam does nothing of course, so I had to get a blocker app. I did finally click on a couple out of curiosity (how much worse could the spam get) and they use every dark pattern there is to try to force a recurring donation. I don’t really get how it’s worth it, but I guess some people must go for it.
I'm not American and have never lived in America, but I get email spam for republican, and only republican fundraisers. Unsubscribe seems to work poorly or not at all, the wording seems similarly unscrupulous/borderline fraudulent.
As someone who receives texts from both parties, my experience has been a higher volume of texts from Dems (probably because I’ve donated to more distinct blue-ish groups) but WAY, WAY more predatory and scammy ones from Republicans.
Just for another data point, I haven’t gotten Wayland screen sharing to work reliably at all. I tried it in Fedora 35 and Ubuntu 22, where Wayland is the default. On Fedora it just didn’t work, and on Ubuntu, Firefox would crash every time. On Chrome it sort of worked after some updates. For Slack you needed to launch from the terminal with special environment variables. There were also weird bugs around docking my laptop, requiring hard resets. All in all, for any sort of modern remote work it wasn’t usable. I switched back to X11 and it’s been smooth sailing. I do miss the fancy trackpad gestures.
Don't use distributions that are stuck with older versions of libraries that are under a ton of active development. Wayland on Ubuntu was okay for me, but running up-to-date Wayland and Pipewire libraries fixed the issues I was having with the distribution's Wayland support.
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