alt Hacker NewsI wonder when contemporary developers will (re)invent Emacs/Gnus: the unified inbox for email, feeds, and news, because what really matters are text messages + eventual multimedia content, personal and private scoring to manage them, and a consistent local UI that allows for personal archiving and resharing.
I've looked at the Fediverse, objectively with little hope and many design issues, I'm watching Nostr with interest even though it seems more like a rough sketch lacking the ideas to move forward, but that concept of Gnus and Usenet, so simple in itself, still hasn't managed to resurface.
Replies
As a long time Emacs user, I never even tried Gnus, or used it as a calendar (except for some time tracking in org-mode). How would calendar invites work there? How well does it support shared calendars to determine busy/free information of others?
Gnus it's dog slow, be with email or with usenet. I say this as an ex-Emacs user where I even plugged slrn's cache in order to speed up things, but over 100k messages that was unusable in my netbook, even under 64 bit machines and native compilation. Slrn did it better. On RSS, I use sfeed which is more Unix like and I just plumb lynx/links or whatever I like as a reader. And fast, much fast than GNUs, Elfeed or the core RSS reader in Emacs.
OTOH, Emacs it's the only libre Usenet reader for Android. Go figure, and that being a dead simple protocol. Despite of that, lots of Thunderbird forks in FDroid didn't adapt the Usenet part yet.
Offpunk it's slow but adding multiprocessing with flock (for python3 maybe) would be a piece of cake in order to allow parallel downloads while syncinc.
OP here and Vim/UNIX fan.
I get the idea behind "reinventing Emacs".
But there are main differences:
- offpunk is an offline content browser/reader. Main component is fetching/caching/displaying ressources
- offpunk is developed as a set of components that can be used separately (openk, ansicat, netcache)
- offpunk delegates as much as possible to other UNIX tools (less for browsing/reading, chafa for images, grep to find in a page, $EDITOR for editing needs )
- offpunk is pure CLI tool. You type commands, results is displayed in your terminal or in less. There’s no "keyboard shortcuts" or "environment". It is a prompt on which you type commands
- There’s no "configuration" in offpunk. The only (but powerful) way on configuring is having offpunk launch commands at starts (commands listed in offpunkrc). So no "configuration language" or syntax or plugins or whatever.
- last but not least: basic use of Offpunk is simple. You are not required to learn much and you use only what you want. Lot of Offpunks users don’t use the Web/HTTP part and use it as a straight Gemini browser (for the record, Offpunk is a fork of AV-98, the very first Gemini browser)