date: 2019-06-03 layout: post title: “Initial pre-release of aerc: an email client for your terminal”
tags: [“aerc”, “announcement”]
After years of painfully slow development, the aerc email client has seen a huge boost in its pace of development recently. This leads to today’s announcement: aerc 0.1.0 is now available! After my transition to working on free software full time allowed me to spend more time on more projects, I was able to invest considerably more time into aerc. Your support led us here: thank you to all of the people who donate to my work!
I’ve prepared a short webcast demonstrating aerc’s basic features - give it a watch if you’re curious about what aerc looks like & what makes it interesting.
In summary, aerc is an email client which runs in your terminal emulator. If you’re coming from mutt, you’ll appreciate its more efficient & reliable networking, a keybinding system closer to vims, and embedded terminal emulator allowing you to compose emails and read new ones at the same time. It builds on this foundation with a lot of new and exciting features. For example, its “filter” feature allows us to review patches with syntax highlighting:
The embedded terminal emulator also allows us convenient access to nearby git repositories for running tests against incoming patches, pushing the changes once accepted, or anything else you might want to do. Want to run Weechat in an aerc tab? Just like that, aerc has a chat client! Writing emails in vim, manipulating git & hg repositories, playing nethack to kill some time… all stuff you never realized your email client was missing.
I plan on extending aerc in the future with more integrations with version control systems, calendar & contacts support, and more email configurations like notmuch and JMAP. Please consider contributing if you’re interested in writing a little Go, or donating monthly to ensure I always have time to work on this and other free software projects. Give aerc a try and let me know what you think!