My other email client is a daemon

57 points by Shorden

Aks

I love everything about this. I had no idea nethack could do that.

What happens if you get multiple mails in short session? Seems it checks every 5 minutes for you, but if you set that to like 10 seconds and you get 100 mails, do you get a lot of daemons chasing you with mail too?

Shorden

One detail I omitted is that my maildir only gets updated every 4 minutes (while mu4e is running), so checking more frequently than 5 minutes isn’t very useful. To answer your original question, your mbox is only checked by NetHack every MAILCKFREQ turns, so you can only get a mail daemon every 50 moves. AFAIU the developers went through great pains to make the mail daemon/scroll of mail have minimal gameplay impact to avoid an issue where too much mail confers an advantage/disadvantage to the player.
- Aks
  
  Aw, I was hoping to send a ton of mail to you and spawning an army of mail daemons :D
  - Shorden
    
    The more common usage of mail daemons is to send players on NetHack servers like alt.org messages! You can try it out by sshing into nethack@nethack.alt.org, spectating a game, and pressing m to write a message that will get delivered via mail daemon.
    
    Aks
    
    Oh wow, I’ll have to do that, sounds fun!
  - donio
    
    Ohh didn’t realize that nethack.el had a maintained fork! I used to play with that interface all the time but then it wasn’t updated for newer versions of Nethack and I drifted over to DCSS, Brogue and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Time to get back into it!
    
    Shorden
    
    I’m currently in the process of creating a patchset for 3.7; in fact, the gameplay footage shown is from 3.7 under nethack-el. Just be warned that I have run into the occasional segfault (on 3.6.7 and 3.7), so make sure you set the INSURANCE compile time option to have a better chance of recovering games.
    
    donio
    
    Thanks for the tip.
    
    The 3.6.6 M-x nethack-install didn’t work for me out of the box on x86-64 Arch Linux because of conflicting types between include/system.h and unistd.h so I went for enh-367.patch and a manual build and got it running.
    
    quindarius
    
    I really enjoy your code previews. Might have to steal that.
    
    DustyFuzzy
    
    Okay, now I’m jealous of you nethack players. I could really use this in Dwarf Fortress as well.
    
    fstamour
    
    get its mail delivered by a drunk cat that barfs everywhere
    
    (it’s reference to a bug, for those who don’t know)
    
    k749gtnc9l3w
    
    Have you checked if DFhack can be used for that?
    
    DustyFuzzy
    
    Probably could, someone just needs to write a plugin for it.
    
    k749gtnc9l3w
    
    So, basically merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/allicoder/lua-mail-checker/master/mailcheck.lua with the first example from https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/dev/overlay-dev-guide.html#overlay-dev-guide ?
    
    (I don’t play DF so cannot easily check)
    
    steinuil
    
    I knew that every program attempts to expand until it can read mail, but I didn’t know this was (literally!) true about NetHack. Thanks for sharing!
    
    donio
    
    Hack/Nethack was probably among the first non-email programs that did this. According to the wiki the mail daemon was added in Hack 1.0.2 in 1985.