Which email clients work well with keyboard shortcuts?

3 points by tenzo 315 days ago | 8 comments

I have been a longtime user of Superhuman but since they increased the price and now have been acquired by Grammarly (see discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44433994) I want to find an alternative.

It doesn't need to have all the "AI" that Superhuman has but keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys are a must. Must also have a mobile app

I've tried Spark, Shortwave, Apple Mail, Gmail, Thunderbird and none of them really compare.

boofbaf 314 days ago |

Probably alpine or mutt. Both are console based and most linux systems have at least one of them installed usually.

atmosx 314 days ago |

Mutt. The learning curve is substantial and the omnipresence of HTML and graphics is email will make the experience poor… but if you take part in multiple mailing lists and are 99% text and little else, it’s worth the hassle.

scrapheap 313 days ago | |

The lack of support for graphics sounds limiting until you realise that most graphics attached to emails that you need to read, are just in people's signatures and a complete waste of your screen space and bandwidth... :D

msgodel 314 days ago | |

Yeah I was just about to suggest mutt. You can always just | elinks --dump | less for html email.

IMO not having clickable links in email is actually a plus.

atmosx 313 days ago | | |

There was a tool shared on "Show HN" that used a lightweight, local LLM to convert any web page into plain text for use with a text-based browser. I suppose something similar could be done with mutt as well.

achempion 315 days ago |

I wanted to build something similar that works nicely across different devices (mac/linux) that is fast and supports keyboard-first navigation as I'm also struggling with a similar problem.

When surveying potential users I discovered that most are happy with the web gmail interface and don't really care. It sounds like a very niche requirement and it'll be very challenging to find enough customers (1k+) who would care about using a very nice email client.

ale_jacques 314 days ago |

What kind of shortcuts you're looking for? Spark has a lot (almost all primary functions has one) of keyboard shortcuts.

fbu 313 days ago |

Sorry to be that guy. But Emacs ? Free forever and great at keyboard shortcuts.

Probably still needs a good text editor though.