Very recently, I tried using a combination of nail(1), and calendar(1) on OpenBSD as an email and calendaring combination for home use. "nail" is provided by the OpenBSD s-nail package and provides an extended POSIX mailx style environment. calendar(1) is part of the base OpenBSD distribution.
It worked far better than expected. The only thing missed was age calculations for birthdays. I never figured that out. Using the Emacs Diary provided that sort of thing though.
I've since moved to KDE Kontact for mail/calendaring. It works more smoothly if you do a lot of calendar sharing with others, but I could see going back to nail(1)/calendar(1) if Kontact disappoints.
I wanted the TI-99/4 that was marketed at the beginning of the 80s. As it turned out, I didn't own a computer until buying a Tandy PC-6 pocket computer in the mid-eighties.
Fast forward to buying the later TI-99/4A in the beige case in 2023. Booting it up into the Basic prompt gave me a nice flashback to learning Basic in High School on the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I.
I've also bought its cousin the TI-74 BASICALC. Given hindsight, the TI-74 is my favorite TI-99 for retro computing, even though the similarity is limited to a subset of the TI Basic from the TI-99 family. The TI-74s are rugged and available. It's very useful as a desk calculator.
I still have both the 74ALC and a CC-40. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't pick up on how the 74 was essentially just a re-skinned CC-40 until about 10 years ago. You can apparently get a plug adapter for the 74 that lets you drive CC-40 peripherals (not that there are a lot of them around.)
This seems like an expensive hobby, but one that chases that feeling we first got off our first system! I often wish that I understood hardware a bit more when I learned Atari 8-bit BASIC, in the late 80's/early 90's, and would have known to keep everything wrapped up in an environment that wasn't humid. I feel the one I learned on, owned by my dad, was probably moved to the basement storage and is completely corroded at this point.
I'm familiar with a site that once had around 30 Vaxen for scientific computing in the late 1980s. This included Vax 11/780s, 11/750s, uVax I's, uVax II's and eventually a Vax 8800 used to feed a Cray Y-MP. All long gone. Linux has moved in and taken over.
I run email for myself with OpenBSD. The only spam mitigation is spamd(8) in blacklist mode, using nixspam. DKIM isn't checked for inbound mail. Outbound email is signed using the opensmtpd-filter-dkimsign package. There's some spam that makes it through, but not enough to take additional measures.
I also skipped using IMAP or POP3. There's a mail server with global IP addresses, that forwards inbound mail to my local workstation over WireGuard. My email clients read mail directly from /var/mail. Remote email access is via ssh terminal sessions. Not for everyone, but that's what I do.
I think running daemon mode has significant advantages. You can have frames running on multiple virtual desktops for different uses. You can also step away from a buffer, and return to it, maybe from some other location on a different computer.
One thing about Emacs, is it's not really just an editor anymore. Comparing it to other editors kind of misses the mark. It's more like an integrated Lisp development and runtime environment. It reminds me of Smalltalk environments, say Squeak or Pharo, albeit in a very text oriented way.
The world could probably make room for an integrated Lisp development environment that makes GUI programming more of a first class citizen. Maybe something like Medley Interlisp?
Emacs runs on terminals too. If you want GUI's, you can choose Common Lisp with Lem and MCCLIM, or that newish web oriented GUI with a similar environment.
And so? Emacs GUI already does tons of things that don't work in terminal:
- It can render different fontsets
- PDFs
- SVG and images
- Emojis and file icons
- Tooltips
- Drag&Drop and better mouse support (scrolling, selection, etc.)
I think it would be great to have a better GUI layer and native web-browser integration. Emacs' evolution doesn't have to be constrained by terminal limitations, and so far it doesn't seem that it was.
With xterm (Kitty, WezTerm, Alacritty) you can have good mouse support, hence you can have tooltip-like popups (AFAICT eldoc or lsp-ui-doc do it), and likely even drag and drop (never used it).
I suspect that with sixel support, and kitty image protocol support, images could be shown, too. At least, Eat, the elisp-based terminal.emulator, manages to show sixel graphics inside Emacs.
I've become a fairly loyal OpenBSD user in the last 3-4 years. The base OpenBSD load includes a substantial amount of network capabilities, and is cleanly implemented. It's almost too cleanly implemented, to the point of making me feel sort of guilty when I start to clutter up an install with a bunch of packages...
If my needs for storage were more complicated, I would probably use FreeBSD ZFS, but UFS suffices for my rather modest needs.
I use OpenBSD for desktop, web and mail services. There are some limitations, but none that are serious enough to warrant dealing with running another BSD, or Linux distribution.
