I will say I do have a massive, single gripe about Thunderbird, and while it's a trivial thing it's also - and in part because it would be so easy to fix - massively infuriating: the default keybindings for archiving, deleting, marking read emails etc. are, astonishingly, single characters. I've lost count how many times I didn't correctly highlight the filter textbox and started to type a search query, which instead had the effect of randomly archiving, deleting and marking read the top N emails in my inbox before I notice. This is literally why we have control characters, so I find it incredible that this is not only the default behaviour but unchangeable without a plugin [1]. I still find the tool very useful in every other way but I can't believe something so obviously wrong has not yet been fixed after what must be at least 20 years of this software tool being available.
[1] https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-GB/thunderbird/addon/tbkey...
And I went back to webmail for 6 weeks because when tbird upgraded itself, the new OAuth (I think) stuff needed cookies, which I didn't allow so just couldn't connect and just kept failing without any explanation. That took half a day of chasing down.
And if I get a calendar invite it just tells me "all calendars are currently disabled. Enable an existing calendar or add a new one..." without 1) saying why or 2) saying how (and why would it not just use the one it's literally showing me while saying they're disabled).
And it doesn't recognise domains correctly, and it strips out inline attachments (yes, really), and fucks up formatting (turns html mails into messed up plain text), and it's caused me so much grief since its install, can anyone suggest a competent, reliable email client that has a focus on quality and not a focus on stupid UI crap that makes it feel like someone's personal side-project. I'd gladly pay .
As a user, I'd prefer a minimalist office suite that still doesn't have the browser as a starting point.
I think a browser is actually not a good UI for an office programs, because it really awkwardly competes with your own document model: HTML at its core still wants to be a document, except probably not the document you want to have. So you have to reimplement document APIs on top of already existing document APIs.
E.g., tracking and working with selected text is extremely important in office programs, but a browser already has built-in management of text selections: Except, the built-in management doesn't know which part is your chrome and which is your document, making you to either implement your own selection mechanism in addition to the browser's or handle all kinds of really weird special cases.
And so on...
As far as email clients go, Thunderbird is literally what you are suggesting. Thunderbird is essentially the Firefox web browser, with all of the browser front-end code stripped off, and an email client dropped in its place.
FWIW, my email life improved massively when I left the likes of Thunderbird and KMail behind for the simplicity of mu/mu4e [1]. I hear similarly stellar things about Notmuch [2]. I'm never going back to an email client that even thinks about itself in relation to "office suites".
(For casual reading, and very rare composing, on a phone, k9 works passably well for me [3])
That's thunderbird for ya.
Really the only web-browsery thing a mail client needs is rendering of the email itself (if it's not just plain text, HTML email is an extension!), for which, sure, it's a better idea to use an existing webview. But for the rest of the interface and logic? No.
(I like electron fwiw, it's enabled me to have a desktop experience with applications that would've otherwise never come to linux)
Thank you for recognizing this. I admit I had a moment of doubt before pressing "submit". :)
I think NextCloud [0] has a few apps that do G Suite-type stuff, but I don't have experience using them. Etherpad [1] also seems really good, I've used it in a few Zoom calls and the experience was smooth. Personally, I'm looking for a Google Photos alternative that's stable enough for my parents to use.
I don't use thunderbird currently, but have for /very/ short amounts of time in the past. What seems bloated about it? For reading and writing e-mail it worked fine and other features seemed to stay out of the way in menus I didn't need to use.
Does it? There was just an article about claws mail on HN. Or on the office side, gnumeric and abiword seem decent enough.
I feel like we've lost some of the point of open source. My rose-tinted glasses are probably in play, but I used to be able to use software, build it and modify it.
Today, the idea of being a "casual" contributor seems to be lost. Things need a huge build process, and some kind of management organisation. The emphasis used to be on contributing patches, not funding.
I think what those have in common is being corporate codebases that were "dumped" as open source. If you look at the equivalents that were built as open-source from day 1 - KMail, Konqueror, and KOffice - you find something that while still C++ is much cleaner and better structured, since they were always meant to be maintained by a distributed collaboration rather than a small team of l33t h4x0rs.
> Surely there is a space for minimalist office suites and email clients, written starting with a browser as a jumping off point, rather than a compiler? I guess I'm arguing for an Electron-based docs/sheets/email/calendar using modern software best practices, and great components. An email client should be a webview + sql-lite, no? And (for office docs) maybe with a more thoughtful file format, like a simple html subset. Does this exist?
I don't think browser-based is the right direction, and I actually think browser-based may detract from having good standard UI component libraries, since the browser itself tends to fall into the trap you mentioned - browser-native components are simultaneously not great, but imposing and complex enough to suck the oxygen away from alternatives. But I agree there's a lot of value in using existing frameworks and libraries to develop your applications, and definitely something that contributes to both OpenOffice/LibreOffice and Mozilla-family applications being as complicated as they are is the fact that they include their own one-off GUI frameworks. (In fairness Mozilla did originally make a legitimate attempt to make their GUI framework an actual first-class GUI framework that could be used for other applications with XULRunner etc., but those days are long gone now). Again this is somewhere where I find KDE family applications shines in comparison - everything is properly layered between the libraries, frameworks, and applications, and the libraries actually see reuse across a wide range of applications.
The fact that Thunderbird does stuff like this to me really weirds me out, despite mostly loving the program.
I strongly prefer Maildir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir
It might be interesting to try and port/rewrite siag/scheme in a grid to racket (or Julia...)?
It's the only "light-weight" office suite that comes to mind...
Nope. Totally not interested in anything Electron...
Surely there is a space for minimalist office suites and email clients, written starting with a browser as a jumping off point, rather than a compiler? I guess I'm arguing for an Electron-based docs/sheets/email/calendar using modern software best practices, and great components. An email client should be a webview + sql-lite, no? And (for office docs) maybe with a more thoughtful file format, like a simple html subset. Does this exist? And if so where do I get it? (And maybe there are better "jumping off points", like VSCode, which is itself a specialization of Electron).