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Finally Using Emacs for Web Browsing and Email

It has taken a long time, but I've finally managed to get email working relatively well in Emacs! In the end Wanderlust was the client of choice for me. It has a pretty simple file format for organizing mail and the keybindings have already begun to be rather natural. The reasoning behind my quest for merging my email and emacs had more todo with my recent tour than an actual desire or need for checking mail in my text editor. I was perfectly happy with Gmail and in fact I'm technically still using it through IMAP. The real reason was that I wanted to try and reduce my bandwidth usage. On tour I had a 5 Gig cap on my network usage. Having never really monitored this sort of thing before, I had no idea how much bandwidth things like IRC might use when you're talking about every day, all day usage. To make things worse, I forgot to grab the USB cable that would let me check my current usage for the month, so I was essentially flying blind!

My fear of an enormous bill made me consider what I could do reduce my bandwidth. The obvious avoidance of listening to music and watching videos was easy. Also, reading local versions of docs was another helpful tactic. This lead me to see a few things about w3m, which I had tried to use before in Emacs. It dawned on me that things like code examples viewed in a text based web browser makes nothing but sense in my text editor. It makes things like copying and pasting code samples a breeze. After getting used to w3m in Emacs it became clear that I should really try to finally tackle email. As I said, Gmail has been just fine, so the motivation wasn't very strong to move. The killer feature in my mind was tying things into my todo list and avoiding Gmail's constant stream of Ajax requests. I'm sure the bandwidth savings are practically nothing, but nonetheless, it seemed like if I got things working it might really be helpful in ways similar to w3m.

Once things were configured and I managed to get everything working, I did notice some helpful bits. Silly annoyances that really should never have been a problem smoothed out. I'm talking about basic copy and paste issues I noticed here and there when working with Emacs and the rest of my desktop. Little things like working with Trac was also a good deal faster, although it was something of a let down that I couldn't submit updates to tickets. Finally, it seems more reasonable to keep up with mailing lists as most of the necessary content (code) is close at hand. This last aspect seems to be the biggest draw of using Emacs. I primarily write code and keeping more tools inside Emacs makes it faster to transition between those tools and the code I'm working on. Of course it does seem kind of cool in a geeky way to work almost solely in text, but the main nicety is actually being more productive. I'm hoping in the next couple weeks things can continue to become a little more streamlined. The killer app that I would like to find a good Emacs replacement for is my feed reader. Google Reader is great but something more bare might help to move through things faster and generally filter out the cruft. That said, blogs were one of the first things I cut out in my quest to lower bandwidth. My desire to check what is new in the blogosphere has greatly diminished since taking a break. I'd like to potentially keep it that way for a while.

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