Lars Ingebrigtsen

> As it happens, I'm the kind of masochist who uses Sublime Text without any plugins for most of my programming, so I find value in letting people stick to their familiar workflow, even if some might see that workflow as somewhere between 'grossly inferior' and 'literally unusable'.

I definitely think there are upsides to not tweaking your text editor config endlessly, so I understand your point :) What I meant with "vim/emacs" is mostly that sometimes you really want to automate a text editing task, and then it's really convenient to have a programmable text editor. It's also very much a case of [0].

> I'm a bit curious, how well do these tools handle HTML email?

In my case, I use mu4e in emacs to read my mail. Very basic HTML works by default via emacs's native HTML renderer (see, e.g., [1] for old screenshots). That's my preferred solution because I like the keyboard consistency (it's just an emacs buffer) and because there is a command to view the email in an external browser if needed, but it is also possible to render HTML email accurately in emacs by embedding a webkit widget [2]. As for writing, you can write in Org mode format (emacs markdown, if you will) and it gets converted to HTML on send.

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/974/

[1] https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2015/02/10/eww-now-with-fonts/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/l60p6a/howto_mu4e_and_reading_html_mails_with_xwidget/

> As another anecdote, I personally posted a huge list of AWK one-liners 20 years ago to Usenet (comp.lang.awk) and I can't even retrieve that message. That's just pure ASCII text (probably less than 2k) and even the Google Groups (dejanews acquisition) archives don't have it.

This is actually another in a long list of known search bugs on Google Groups: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/kej8-gpVvSU

Broken search has been a constant problem since Google acquired Deja: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/google-a-search-company-has-made-its-internet-archive-impossible-to-search

Google broke the Deja archive after acquiring them in 2001 and it has never worked properly since that time. The UI and the search sucks. The archives are still there though. I wish Google would release the archives to the public and set up a non-profit to manage them.

Compare this to Gmane, essentially a one-man project, where the community stepped up to bring it back on the web after only a couple of months: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/09/06/gmane-alive/

The authentication/federation problem is what killed the public nntp use even among the non-Outlook users; But it was Outlook that had killed it among corporate and professional users. Those are two independent issues.

Gmane[0][1] did bidirectional nntp to mailing-list in 2002; But there's a mismatch, both technical and cultural, with these gateways.

Also, in an internal system, the IT department has to be willing to support them, and they weren't in my cases.

It's now water under the bridge. NNTP is essentially dead except for legally questionable video distribution.

[0] https://news.gmane.io/
[1] https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2020/01/06/whatever-happened-to-news-gmane-org/

Jason Scott from the Internet Archive commented on Lars' blog post, offering to maintain the archive up at the same domain gmane.org https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/comment-page-1/#comment-13501

This is undoubtedly good news, and prove once more what fundamental role the Archive has on the internet. I personally hope they will not only keep the content up, but will continue Lars' work on actively running Gmane.

The Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and lives out of donations. https://archive.org/about/

I know for a fact that if the Emacs developers weren't
doing a bang up job, which they are, then I would
immediately allocate some of my time to help.

Development is going great IMHO. However, the bug count is steadily increasing. Any time invested into emacs is well spent.

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/05/03/emacs-bug-trends/