I’ve been playing around with plain text editing and editors and for the first time discovering their simplicity and power. I knew that it was possible to create formatted documents using LaTeX processors, but had always assumed it was something that would be technically beyond me or more trouble than it is worth.

Now, after learned a little about Markdown, I’ve seen how easy it is to create from an uncoded plain text document perfectly formatted documents in .odt, pdf, .html or other formats. Complexities like structured headings, page numbers, tables of contents, other tables, captioned images and many other things can all be included. The secret is to add a few tiny formatting marks, which do not in any way disturb the readability of the text, and then to run the document through a script called Pandoc which is in any Linux repository and may already be included in the distribution. The command required can be as simple as “markdown2pdf test-pandoc1.text”. For most of my needs, this combination of Markdown and Pandoc is adequate.

Text editors are a joy to use. They are quicker to power-up and less distracting to work with than word processors. There are no complicated commands, ribbons or tool bars to worry about. They use few of the computer’s resources. Depending on the editor, the background can be made colorful, monochrome or transparent. And one can use the same editor to produce any type of document.

I’ve played with a few editors over the last couple of weeks. My current favourite is Cream, which is a simplified version of GVim (one of the most powerful editors on Linux). One thing I like about Cream is that it is easy to wrap and unwrap text. This means that the program can fill the screen, but lines will wrap where I want them to. It has syntax highlighting for Markdown. Another good distraction-free editor is Scribes. It looks great, and is very powerful. One can even run Pandoc without leaving the program.

An advantage of text editors is that from the point of view of a writer with simple text editing needs, there is little real difference between using one or another of them. The text they produce can be opened and will look identical in any other text editor or wordprocessor. Finally, plain text files are lighter than anything produced by LibreOffice or MS Word, and the format is never going to change.

 

I have still not succeeded, really, with an offline mail experience that satisfies me. Partly because I have in parallel been trying to implement a “getting-things-done” (gtd) style task management system. (I use the reference to David Allen’s system loosely and feel obliged to add this comment since so many bloggers and software developers talk about methods that seem quite far from Allen’s system.) Opera’s implementation is quite nice, as discussed, and would be fine for ordinary personal email. But it lacks some features that would make it more suitable for good office management. It’s necessary to go to Google for contacts, calendars, etc. In addition, checking and downloading all those messages placed it under considerable pressure.

Thunderbird has more Gmail integration through various plugins. For example, I found one that adds Google’s search operators like to:name and from:name, has:attachment, etc., which I use a lot. Some things still do not work, such as synchronization with Gmail tasks. Even more than Opera, I found that the offline imap placed the system under a lot of pressure. Sometimes it would become unresponsive. And as mentioned in a previous email I don’t really like the mbox system.

On the basis of good reviews, I decided to try Gnome’s Evolution again. After installation, it remembered my previous configuration from a few months before (though I didn’t try working with it seriously at that time). I think it added, of its own accord, an account for its newer imap+ implementation, and I disabled the previous one. At first everything looked good. It synchronized with the server, Google calendar and Google contacts surprisingly well. But slowly I am discovering bugs and things that do not work as they should. Among these:

• Purging tasks crashes the system
• Impossible to create a task or memo from an email.
• Impossible to edit notes after they have been created. Update: saw how to do this eventually.
• No ability to send an email to a Tomboy task – though this is supposed to be possible.
• Problems with focus (if this is the right jargon): Clicking on the Evolution icon in the Unity Dock does not return one to Evolution from another program. The workaround is to minimize the program that is hiding it, or click on the Evolution link in the notifications area. A similar issue exists with dialog boxes: once I had to ‘kill’ the Evolution process in the System Monitor. Update: this seems to have been a problem only with one session.
• Problems with offline imap: it isn’t possible to specify offline imap in the accounts preferences. It’s possible to right click on individual folders to request offline use. But even after I do so I find that some messages are still unavailable.

That’s all too many too many major bugs (and there may be more) in a system which is supposed to be so central to Gnome. But according to the reviews, it’s still way-ahead of Kmail, which I previously used very successfully over an extended period.

As mentioned at the beginning, I’ve been trying to set up a gtd style system which I will be happy with, but which will work with both Google online and offline, so this also a factor in choosing how to work with these programs. I might even use Mutt or Gnus, but there are lingering problems with Hebrew support, which I also need for about 10% of my emails.

Update: I’m still using Evolution, despite the described problems. For my gtd solution, I star a message then delete it from the inbox. It shows up in the Starred folder, and sometimes add a reminder in Tasks. For messages that cannot be dealt with quickly, either because they require input from someone else or a series of actions, I move them to a folder called Action. I haven’t quite decided whether to use Tasks for writing notes on these messages, or whether to use Emacs Org-mode. When messages have been dealt with, I remove the stars, and will remove them from the action folder. Some types of messages I will still store in special folders, rather than just in All Mail.

Our telephone line needs fixing. Every time it rains we lose the internet. The phone company guy said he found the tell-tale evidence of mice nibbling the cables. We’ve called an electrician. But this experience, my annual trips to India, and the occasional slowness of Gmail’s servers, have convinced me I need to become more independent of a constant online connection. In addition, while Gmail is very convenient, I’m beginning to be irked by that convenience. So although I’ve been such an enthusiastic proponent of Gmail, and have been responsible for getting numerous people in our offices off mail clients and onto webmail, now I’m going back.

For some time I’ve been handling my home email through Opera’s mail client through imap. I got the idea of doing the same with my work email, which is much busier. At first I tried Thunderbird, but couldn’t get used to it (even after tweaking with the conversation view plugin and calendar sync). Also, from the days when I did use Thunderbird, I have at least one bad memory of its file system. It just doesn’t seem safe to have all messages in a single corruptible file. So I looked for other solutions.

I’ve heard lots of good reviews of Mutt, and was able to fairly quickly set this up. Just as everybody says, Mutt is amazing. But I think it would take me a while to get used to working in a console. Further, since much of my email is html, or needs translation, I’m still going to end up going back into a browser. I also noticed that the Hebrew subject lines get reversed (from left to right). I do like the fact that Mutt’s Mail dir file system is equally accessible to Kmail and Evolution, among others.

Eventually, I’ve just added another account to my Opera mail client. That was just in time for the upgrade Opera have just made to the appearance of their mail client (though I’ve been enjoying the change in Beta for some time now). But also before the upgrade, Opera has had special settings for Gmail (taking into consideration its labeling system, and other features), so it’s about as good as an offline client could be. Opera also has a really fast and capable search, and various other unique features.

The advantage of using Opera is also that I can have my offline imap email open in one tag, and still open other Google applications like the calendar in another tab. That’s not exactly cheating, since I’m not as dependent upon these applications as upon email.

So now I’ve simplified my system so that instead of using multiple browsers and programs, I can let Opera handle most of my communications needs: public and private email, newsfeeds and general surfing. Although I’m offline, Google Talk is still available through Pidgen. I’ve enabled privacy controls to prevent Google and other companies from tracking me.

It’s too early to say how offline email will work for me, but so far it feels good.

PS: Someone might wonder why not simply to use Google’s native offline client available in Chrome. Unfortunately, it isn’t configurable at all. It’s possible to download about a week’s email and then important messages from the past. But I frequently need to check back through my entire message store. Chrome’s offline gmail client seems to be intended strictly for casual use or internet emergencies. Google would obviously prefer for us to use their online client and yesterday they added new social features (which won’t necessarily please everybody).