paul van der walt via nettime-l on Tue, 8 Aug 2023 11:23:10 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> RIP Bram Moolenaar



On 2023-08-08 at 09:49 +02, quoth Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>:
On 8/7/23 16:25, Ted Byfield via nettime-l wrote:

For many years, nettime ran on bespoke hacks of Mailman that allowed mods to use the text editor vim to clean up messy formatting, hack away at the endless quoted text that accumulated, compile digests
from threads, maintain procmail and spam filters, and more. In
different and non-obvious ways, all that tweaking was essential to the list's...I dunno, style? aesthetic? vibe? It's interesting to think about what word would express (not "capture," ugh) whatever all that was. In any event, I think it's fair to say the list probably
wouldn't still exist if it weren't for vim.

Yes, indeed. And it's hard to think of vim without thinking of the late Sven Guckes, one of it's most skillful users and educators. He showed us how to use vim to actually create the digests for nettime. The pipeline was mailman, vim, mutt, mailman. I think I still have some muscle memory of
the short-cut sequence. Command-line pleasures.

I'd actually be interested to hear more about what this modify-then-send workflow looked like, and why you used it. Was this from a time before Mailman supported digests out of the box? Or did you want to do some editorial/curatorial work? Or simply exacting standards for what the final product should look like?

I think Ted mentioned removing deeply-nested quoting, i guess i can imagine that going a long way to tidy things up. Modern mail clients especially make it hard to do the bottom-reply thing unless you go out of your way, i guess...
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