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Is aerc better than neomutt now?

5 points by hardikxk ↗ HN
Back in 2019 when aerc just came out it wasn't as good as neomutt (atleast thats what people here claimed). Any power users of aerc I wanna know how your experience has been especially if you work with git patch workflow which has first class support out of the box in aerc.

I have personally tried aerc and really found no issues with it but I want to know why some people prefer neomutt with mutt-wizard over aerc especially today as I believe aerc has matured a lot since its first release.

3 comments

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goodmythical
Not really a "power user" per se, though the act of managing email in CLI probably opts me in to that description.

For what they're worth, I've only ever used aerc and have had no issues in the few months I've been using it, though I just use it to check and respond to email.

eisleggje
It is nice in but the documentation (or at least the wiki) is inconsistent within itself at times. For all its cruft, neomutt is much more accessible in this regard.

The man pages are better, but in the case of more involved setups with notmuch/isync, one can be left wondering what setting needs to be made to achieve some desired behaviour.

There is also a smaller and shorter pool of users so it can be harder to find troubleshooting info. Eg. I rarely use postpone, but today any time I try to recall a postponed draft I am receiving a crash, which I cannot find any previous examples of, even though I presume recalling a draft while using isync is a common case.

I assume the IRC chats are a good place to address any of these, but I haven't made the time to hop on yet, as I'm not a habitual user of IRC, and as is predictable, I'd like a nice terminal client configured...

The promise of the UI being non-blocking is not entirely true. In many cases some operation blocks the UI. Eg. deleting a large amount of mails is not using async I/O.

The threading UI is nice. Does neomutt have that these days?

I would guess neomutt probably still has the edge in raw extensibility or at least cases where that extensibility is more easily discoverable (due to a larger pool of users blazing the trails before you). But you can do a lot in aerc between external editors, filters, your pager, and handlers. And whatever you discover you cannot do, you can likely submit a patch for, if you know go.

That said, Aerc feels more modern in many ways. If I can fix my handful of personal peeves with it, I will be happy enough. I don't need most of the fancier stuff I see some doing in Neomutt. I'll probably check out others like meli and alpine eventually.