On 14Apr2016 12:23, derek martin <inva...@pizzashack.org> wrote: [...snip...]
IIRC there's a terminal-based web browser that has the ability to display web pages, including images, in your terminal window--though it may require the use of some specific terminal program, I can't recall.
I'm using iTerm 3 beta on OSX, and it is capable of displaying images. Mutt would probably need to allow certain extra ANSI-like codes through in the pager, _and_ grow some special support for recognising such things.
Displaying web pages had traditionally been handled by handing the page content off to an external view "pop this message text up in firefox" for example. That could be made easier or better supported: all such actions require writing the message text (and possibly assets, such at attached images) into a temporary file or directory and calling the external viewer with the pathname in some fashion eg a "file:///" URL. The catch is that mutt normally removes such things when done, and with an asynchronous tool like a browser "done" is ill defined. So a facility for mutt to spawn a helper process to track this and then clean up, or not clean up, might be useful; then one could package some default behaviours with mutt built on such a thing.
So even better HTML mail support should be doable in Mutt without making it a GUI...
Having mutt ship with more flexible default configurations would help. There are plenty of recipes floating around for "use w3m or lynx to render HTML as plain text and page that", but they don't ship with mutt itself - every user must pick a recipe and implement it.
But I would frankly like to see a GUI option as well; I think it would be great if Mutt could switch back and forth and have a relatively consistent UI in both cases. It's totally doable. This is the kind of stuff that a modern mailer is expected to have...
Doable portably would imply shipping an optional GUI kit with mutt; and X11 is not the only desktop environment; while I can run X11 on this Mac it is more seamless with native apps. So a toolkit which knew about multiple platforms migh be necessary eg Qt; IIRC there are licencing issues there in addition to the loud debate about the GUI kit and whether to ship it at all.
For many of us mutt is text, letting us remain in our flexible terminal environments without the mouse happy glaring white hassle of a GUI, and it might be an anathema to give mutt any kind of "native" GUI facility.
I had the unpleasant experience of finding an Emoji rendered in my mutt index listing a week or so ago, and I thought the End Times had come. Thank you, Unicode Consortium.
But I agree it would be good if more of the "extension" facilities we use with mutt were available _easily_ to new users.
Cheers, Cameron Simpson <c...@zip.com.au> Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it.
