Yesterday I thought I should try to find a better alternative to Apple Mail on macOS, because I’ve been missing good shortcuts (and vim ofc) when I navigate my mailboxes and compose new emails. So I remembered I discovered aerc earlier this year, so I gave it another look.

For those who don’t know, aerc is a terminal based email client that uses vim-like bindings. It’s very customizable and the configuration steps are easy enough to understand. It supports plain text and html emails, but with HTML emails it requires an extra line of configuration in aerc.conf. You can find my configurations here.

I setup my aerc for my personal emails to begin with, if I find it’s not becoming an inconvenience after a few weeks of use I might try to add my work email as well. But I guess I have to configure it some more if I’m going to use it for work, as I’ve already deleted some old emails by accident 😅.

# UPDATE: 2022-01-09

I used aerc for a month or two and decided to switch back to Apple Mail. It’s missing some features that I rely on, like aliases. It also crashes when it has been open for a certain amount of time. I might check out neomutt in the future.