My Other Email Client Is a Daemon
Posted5 months agoActive4 months ago
feyor.shTechstory
calmpositive
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Email ClientsNethackUnix Tools
Key topics
Email Clients
Nethack
Unix Tools
The author describes their unconventional email client setup using a daemon and shares a creative integration of email in the game Nethack, sparking discussion about Unix tools, email clients, and game design.
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Very active discussionFirst comment
10h
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Key moments
- 01Story posted
Aug 21, 2025 at 4:54 AM EDT
5 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Aug 21, 2025 at 2:46 PM EDT
10h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
22 comments in Day 1
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Aug 31, 2025 at 3:19 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
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Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 44970563Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:54:29 PM
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I took three approaches for me over a span of two years to really get into emacs. It was pretty tough (a time before google was a thing).
Now iam spoiled - I recently tried vscode a bit and really was baffled because it seems there is no kill ring like the one in emacs that makes it basically impossible to lose any edits.
For me it was org mode (with evil mode because I was coming from 15+ years of Vim). Then..
"Oh, I can manage files and edit a directory like a file buffer.."
"Oh, I can SSH into systems and edit files but it doesn't even feel like SSH.."
"Oh, this makes a great, distraction free IDE.."
I recommend a batteries included distro like Doom Emacs or Space Emacs.
I'm unlikely to give up evil with ~25 years of Vi/Vim muscle memory, but I'm open to trying other systems in the future. Since Vi/Vim operations are verb -> object, the advantages of object -> verb commands are tempting so one can see the target of a command before it's actual execution. The Vim workaround is invoking visual mode, of course.
Obviously with vanilla Vim, you're going to have to memorize everything and I eventually did that way back when. Being presented with the key bindings menu helps to remind me of things that I use less frequently and avoids time spent digging into the help system.
Sorry for the slow reply (but then my HN replies are never guaranteed either).
sees: "an uncursed food ration"
This is wild; I gotta start playing text based games.
From the wiki: "Food rations have a 1/7 chance of being rotten when eaten if they are uncursed and older than 30 turns, or else are blessed and older than 50 turns, while cursed food rations are always rotten. Food rations can be thrown to tame domestic canines and felines and pacify domestic equines. "
https://crawl.develz.org
Anyone who loves Nethack should try Slashem a bit.
You can almost assume the availability of make but a lot of distros (hello, Ubuntu) omit basic build tools.
Admittedly I used an LLM recently to write me a Makefile because my brain doesn't have the capacity to remember all make's idiosyncrasies every few years that I touch a Makefile. Once the file is done, it's done, and it was easy to pare down from the verbosity that the LLM coughed up.
I also wanted targets for intermediate build files (long story) so that would have required excessive poring over the man page.
[1]: https://github.com/kurtbuilds/checkexec [2]: https://github.com/casey/just
This reminds me of the Wii U port of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. During the Wii U/3DS era nintendo had their own social network called miiverse, which was functionally identical to twitter but games could access and post messages to your miiverse account. Wind Waker's integration was to let you scribble down a miiverse post onto a sheet of paper (via the Wii U's touchscreen) and Link would roll it up and shove it into a bottle then throw it out to sea. It would then wash up on a beach in somebody else's game and you likewise would find other peoples' miiverse-in-a-bottle posts scattered all over the beaches of hyrule.
"Are you sure you want to play one more turn? You have 8,371 unread messages."
(Full disclosure: That's the current unread message count for my wife's inbox, NOT mine ;) )
We've seen a lot of trivial local escalations like that in the past.
On Nethack, I prefer Slashem which is kinda the same as a megaextended 3.4.3 with new classes and roles. Oh, and I play Nethack 3.6.7 too because of Pratchett.