"You can set your EDITOR to emacs and replace aerc's default keybindings with a more emacs-inspired set."
I appreciate the suggestion, but unfortunately that's not even remotely adequate.
By integration I mean exposing every single function and UI element of the client to Emacs, so that they can be bound, wrapped and extended as needed. Ideally, these functions would be written in eLisp, so they themselves could be modified and customized to taste while leveraging the enormous Emacs eLisp ecosystem.
Emacs email clients have this sort of integration, and it is what gives them tremendous flexibility and power.
You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky. As currently configured, opening gnus on my (admittedly a bit large) Maildir takes more than an hour (no, really, I'm not joking); of course, once it's up I dare not close it, and that works out fine for me.
>You can also say that Gnus is slow, if you want to be extra cheeky.
gnus is not the only way to do email in Emacs. IME, it is the most bloated way to do it.
While I didn't like the tone of the person's comment, I do sympathize with him. I used various email programs (pine, mutt, Thunderbird, etc) for years - but all of them seemed to lack something, and the effort to add my desired features was too high. With Emacs, the barrier to customize my workflow is a lot lower. Now that I've been using Emacs + notmuch for mail for the last few years, it's really hard to motivate myself to try anything outside Emacs, and the feeling is much worse when it's something cool like this.
I even haven't bothered with alot, although it is notmuch based. I mean, is it trivial for me to make an Org mode TODO linking to an email while in alot?
I appreciate the suggestion, but unfortunately that's not even remotely adequate.
By integration I mean exposing every single function and UI element of the client to Emacs, so that they can be bound, wrapped and extended as needed. Ideally, these functions would be written in eLisp, so they themselves could be modified and customized to taste while leveraging the enormous Emacs eLisp ecosystem.
Emacs email clients have this sort of integration, and it is what gives them tremendous flexibility and power.