[Alpine-info] Alpine on mobile devices

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Stefan Bertels wrote:


> On Tue, 4 Nov 2008, Menge, Oliver wrote:

> > I am using putty every day on my E51 (which even does not have the

> > full keyboard) to access my linux box and alpine thereon.

> 

> I'm familar with this solution and hmmm ... it's better than nothing.

> One problem is when your connection gets lost: it's more work than

> just "enter mailbox again" or something like "re-enable IMAP idle".


I've used pine and now alpine since 1998, in fact I use it for hours
every day as I cba turning my desktop on at home these days.

You need to use "screen", it's by far the most useful program I use and
have used in my life to date.


> And you cannot use some keyboard (Nokia E71) shortcuts with S60-putty,

> e.g. numbers by pressing long. And you cannot store and load

> attachments to phone's memory or just open links in phone's web

> browser! Many mails are connected to webpages (http links) and you

> generally want to use your default browser for this (might be

> different to your server's lynx).


You need one of Nokia's "communicator" range, the N97 soon to be
launched might change the game though.


> Alpine+putty on S60 is comparable to using alpine+putty on MS Windows:

> there are too many hassles to use this every day (as long as you

> really work with at client-level all-day).


I have caca* tools for image and video playback, lynx and links for
browsing.  I'm old-school and like lynx a lot, but links supports
session cookie caching, making it faster to use against authenticated
systems.  Other solutions are good c+p  in the latest s2putty client to
browser for web stuff and better image viewing (better than cacaview).
I also have my .mailcap run scripts which check for xlock and talk
locally to firefox if I'm at my desk, spawn links if I'm away and sshed
in (xlock is running).
 

> There is a solution for S60 named "ProfiMail" which is much better

> than putty+alpine for every-day work. But it lacks most of the

> features that make (al)pine so great. A native alpine would be a

> better mailer than all existing ones -- not only for alpine regulars.

> 

> Is there a chance for this to happen (i.e. support by alpine authors)?


It's not impossible, I've been hacking at s2putty recently as I like the
excellent fast vt emulation, so I plan to port a few cmdline things,
initially stuff like ping/traceroute/minicom and other diagnostic tools
but later maybe something like alpine, so I could do some offline
reading on the phone, twould need to not use imap, or have an imap sync
to local imap daemon.

This is so far down on my todo list it hurts, maybe when my kids get
older and leave home (~18years from now).

Damion