JP Demas

I’m building Spondr. The local first Linux email client I couldn’t find. Native Rust. No intermediary servers. No bloat. Submitted for Google OAuth verification 8 days early! Follow for the dev logs. 🧵 (1/n) #SpondrLog

@growth_pigeon @preciaddddo @ThePeterMick I did the same thing!

@preciaddddo @ThePeterMick 😁😁

Bye bye Apple Watch, opening this now

"Customizable" is often just a polite way of saying "we haven't finished the product." Config file, keybindings, CSS overrides — that's actual customization. Plugin systems are usually a handoff. Spondr has no plugin API. It has config.toml.

@ThePeterMick Indeed.

@jpdemas Silver one??

There's a version of "customizable" that means "fix it yourself." Not in the bad way, the honest way. When a tool gives you a config file, it says: here are the knobs, these are the decisions we've made for you, and these are the ones you get to own. That's not a limitation. That's a boundary. Spondr doesn't have a plugin system. What it has is config.toml, user.css, a CLI, and URL schemes. Enough to customize your workflow without opening a security hole the size of a plugin API. The tradeoff is real: fewer extensions, more control, and a product that doesn't become someone else's maintainer project. Alacritty doesn't have plugins. The best tools on Linux are powerful because someone drew a line and said: this is ours, that is yours. That line is a feature.

@Teknium @tombombadeel @redtachyon lol

@jpdemas @tombombadeel @redtachyon What you dont have a billion dollars a week to spend?? 🫣😅

@jpdemas @redtachyon oh yea and if anybody knows I was the biggest cursor stan on twitter for the last 2 years lol

@Teknium @tombombadeel @redtachyon I can’t pay for Opus all day every day 🤣

@tombombadeel @jpdemas @redtachyon Opus

@austinmwelch5 @maxkolysh Will this work if I’m running it in a Docker container?

@maxkolysh 1Password CLI + service account token. On Linux it's seamless — no biometric prompts, no "approve in desktop app" interruptions. Set OP_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN once, scope it to a dedicated vault, and every op read just works headlessly. Night and day vs the Mac experience.

by far the most painful part of using hermes (and openclaw) is secrets management. who is solving this?

@souly9999 @maxkolysh This is similar to what I do.

@maxkolysh Use a container with litellm proxy. Openclaw and hermes cannot see the creds

config.toml, user.css, spondr:// No plugin system. Stability by design. Sometimes the constraints are the product.

Electron email clients on Linux aren't bad. They're just not native. There is a massive difference between an app that runs and one that fits.

@Teknium @redtachyon How? Just straight up cli?

Should I actually try hermes agent? How is it different from openclaw (which to me seemed largely useless)?

@teeetariq @Teknium @NousResearch Not yet. Just in my head at this point.

@jpdemas @Teknium @NousResearch Did you try anything?

I want Hermes to be proactive @Teknium @NousResearch

Ubuntu 26.04 requiring 6GB RAM is a sign of the times. Most people have just accepted that their desktop tools will eat their hardware. Building native with Rust and Tauri means we can deliver a first-class Gmail experience without the Electron tax. Spondr is light because it was designed to be.

@Teknium @teeetariq @NousResearch I actually brought this up in discord but got crickets. I’m gonna write a wake-up daemon triggered by cron jobs.

@teeetariq @NousResearch What model? if it's gpt, good luck we've tried a million things that every other agent claims makes it proactive lol if not try turning tool guidance on in the config: #tool-use-enforcement" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guid…

@Teknium @redtachyon Really? Replaced Cursor?

@redtachyon It's completely replaced claude code, codex, and the thing I was using primarily, cursor for me

@Jason It’s what the Cybertruck should have been

if anything remotely close to this CyberSUV concept drops, it will take over the entire SUV category Would love to have hyper-lifted feature in this, in order to navigate Tahoe blizzards!

@WilliamSco30462 GPUI introduces a whole other set of potential issues. Will look at Startupsubmit when we're ready. Going through CASA audit now.

@jpdemas Yep, mostly. GPUI if you want native-feeling desktop stuff fast, but it's still kinda sharp around the edges. I went with Startupsubmit for the boring launch distro part, not the app stack though

Tauri is 10MB because it doesn't package Chromium. Native email should feel that light. Most desktop clients live in your tray all day; they shouldn't demand half a gigabyte just to read text.

@GregorySchier It’s a real thing. Not critical for an email client, but I plan to mitigate w/default config + flatpak

@jpdemas Ah, that's interesting. I use Tauri for Yaak and have had nothing but trouble with Linux. Tons of driver/lib issues which cannot be solved by me 😢 yaak.app/feedback/posts…

Plugins are the easy answer for extensibility, but they're also a source of instability. Spondr is taking the config-first path. Deep control via config.toml and user.css. Total personalization without arbitrary code sprawl.