[sup-talk] Persistence between IMAP clients

[Gabriel Sean Farrell]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2008 at 10:12:43AM -0800, William Morgan wrote:
> Why is it that people are so excited about having an email clients with
> this crazy client/server architecture? We don't demand that of any other
> console program we use.

Let's see, what console programs do I have open right now?  Mutt, irssi,
lynx, tintin++, and btlaunchmanycurses.  We've already discussed Mutt.
irssi is a great example of a console program that acts as a client to a
server.  lynx is an example of the most commonly understood
client/server relationship today.  tintin++ is a mud client, and the
improvements it has over simple telnet clients in the specific domain of
muds could serve as a model for others that rely on ssh/sftp/etc for
other domains.  btlaunchmanycurses is a curses bittorrent client and,
being bittorrent, connects to other clients instead of a server.
Nonetheless, it demonstrates another protocol that I choose a console UI
for.

Even Vim provides the option of editing via sftp and scp, essentially
creating a client connection to files on a server.  It's a pretty
fantastic feature that I recommend you try out if you haven't done so
already.

> If you can run a sup server somewhere, surely you can run sshd there
> instead. The only difference would be UI lag on slow connections. Is
> that the big win?

The ability to access these programs over ssh is part of the reason I
use them, but I prefer running them on the local box because UI lag and
dropped connections have frustrated me enough that I'd rather not deal
with them when I don't have to.