alt Hacker NewsThere are many choices for email client interfaces. HTML for email does not have a good reputation among hackers. After all, email can be considered an ancient technology and is historically based on plain text - HTML breaks not only the philosophy but also many of the tools developed around email.
I have found a sweet spot for an email client between a pure CLI and a full-featured (HTML) GUI client - I use Emacs Gnus, which takes full advantage of Emacs' text-based interface. As always with Emacs, the learning curve is a bit steep at first, but the rewards can be reaped afterwards.
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> HTML breaks not only the philosophy but also many of the tools developed around email
I was one of these die-hard-text-only people, back in the mid to late 90s. It was true. People were sending HTML/rich text emails, and it broke everything, and it was awful to read with. Not to mention the kilobytes of bandwidth wasted!
But it's 2024 now. There are vastly more tools that can deal with HTML email than those that can't. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it's 4 orders of magnitude.
Sorry, folks, we lost. Email is not plain text any more. We can't pretend that it is or should be.
I disagree that email should be plain text, but honestly I don't think that's really relevant to the question. I read the question as "why CLI instead of GUI", which I think is totally fair. Using a CLI email client instead of a GUI strikes me like using your feet to open jars - maybe you can do it, but it's so much harder for no benefit.
> As always with Emacs, the learning curve is a bit steep at first
For any Emacs users who are interested in using Emacs for mail but don't want to deal with the learning curve of Gnus, check out mu4e, which is easier.
https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e/
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/mu4e