On 2023-08-08 at 09:49 +02, quoth Felix Stalder via nettime-l
<[email protected]>:
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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