Re: alpine (was Re: UTF-8?)

On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Steve Hubert wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Ryan Barrett wrote:
>> cool! i know lots of free-as-in-freedom people will be excited about the
>> apache license. as a patch writer, i'm more interested in the refactoring. is
>> "pith/" a C utility library/portability layer, similar to apache's APR?
>
> It's a C library which is a first attempt at separating the user interface
> from the lower level stuff.

Do you mean the "accounts stuff" as the lower level stuff?

In other words, would the lower level stuff be a foundation to write another
email client on?

I realize this is one of a million ideas I have that I'll probably never
do anything with, but writing the perfect (or closer-to-perfect) email
program(*) is something I'd like to do.  But mostly I just want to do the
UI, and the underlying mail guts part is a pain.

Having an API that let me just give it the account info, and then easily
traverse over mailboxes and specific messages/message parts, and hopefully
even deal with things like threading for me would be great.  That is, by
"deal with", I would tell it what threading to use, and it would give
me some kind of tree that I could display.

I think the imap code that pine uses is already sort of along these lines.

(*) In short - VERY slight GUI layer on top of the existing pine. 
By default still use the existing keyboard-based UI as pine but also have
menus for things.  Drag/drop of email/attachments as well as existing pine UI.
Still 99% plain-text-based but optionally be able to VIEW the icky rich text
or HTML parts [this is where being able to get the parts of a message as
a stream to simply slam into a WebKit view would be useful].  Be able to
open messages into separate windows as one would expect with a GUI client.
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