I wonder to what extent this is just habituation to styles that do not do what they are doing.
If I might, modern people tend to find cursive difficult to read. This depends somewhat on culture (nastaliq is the default in Iran) but is a kind of generalized trend that holds for most modern developed countries (see gyousho and sousho almost disappearing in daily use in Japan outside of menus and signage and - increasingly rarely - formal letters). It's not as if, I think, that when these older forms were more common that people struggled to read them (at least, not anymore than individual handwriting typically causes problems).
People who grew up writing cursive also often struggle with older scribal hand (though less so than someone who did not grow up with cursive), say from 1500s-1700s. Again, I think it's unlikely that the writers of those hands were so constrained by medium and technology (or cultural norms) that they chose to write in a way that was deemed inaccessible. (One might, if not attenuated to it, say that sousho is akin to deliberate cultural obfuscation, but my experience suggests that you quickly learn to recognize the patterns in kuzushiji.)
In the case of CJK scripts, brush pens haven't changed. Fountain pens are perfectly adequate for cursive (though some nibs were developed that differ specifically to make them even more suitable). For nastaliq, as for naskh, a reed pen is fine for both. (Modern pencils, ballpoints, and typical modern Western-tipped FPs do struggle to give nastaliq the line variation needed for a legible result). For Western scripts, pens and their tipping simply hasn't changed much beyond a decrease in the flexibility of nibs in FPs. (Something which also varied historically - pens oriented at most shorthand styles always had hard tips, excluding those shorthand styles that incorporate line-width variation which was meant to be achieved with a flexible tip.)
So my thinking is this is mostly something that comes down to 'are you used to it' and shifts in this area have a lot mroe to do with culture than anything else.
There are of course two other matters.
First, how easy something is to learn - I think the only place this is a consideration is sousho of the scripts I've mentioned (even with nastaliq's hundreds of thousands of possible ligatures).
Second, are the people around you accustomed (culturally) to the hand you are writing in, and how hard is it for them to adapt if they are not. Broadly speaking, people are not accustomed to reading much cursive in general these days, let alone one that varies from the recent hands of the area. So generally if one is writing for coworkers say, one would do well to simply write in print or at most a semi-cursive style.
In that regard the more that something deviates from its print form, the harder it will be to read for them. This ultimately comes down to interpersonal consideration - if you're writing for yourself or people who are regularly reading/writing cursive, I don't think the author's changes will be a significant issue beyond a short acclimatization phase that does not extend far beyond the phase that would be needed to adapt to an individual's personal quirks in a hand that has had some recent sway in the local area (and those hands do differ by country/area, quite a lot). (As a tangent, some of these tricks of the author's are commonplace in specific historical European hands.)
Personally, I feel this isn't really an issue, as someone who has learnt multiple languages to proficiency (some with anki involved, some without). I mean I'm at a level where I speak mostly fine, read historical literature, novels, academic/political works, and engage with significantly divergent dialects without any trouble (I'm interested in such things, so.)
You find a word you don't know, you add a sentence. Find a different use in the wild or in the dictionary, add a sentence. Want to harvest many examples at once? If your dictionary lacks example sentences, you should really find a better one (of course, dictionaries with historically oriented/early-attestation examples are not neceessarily bad - many of the best dictionaries are such - but they're not great for mining examples of usage). (Granted, some languages simply don't have dictionaries that meet this criteria, in that case you must work with what you have.) Corpora of speech or literature can also be used if they exist. Most of this process can be automated to 1-2 keypresses.
Yes you get hints from the sentences, but you do too when reading/listening. Seeing a single word in the wild is also likely to lead to some free association shenanigans - ask any native speaker of whatever to define a polysemous word. Multiple sentences can just be added for one word, as needed, though the 'bulk' of sentences for 'review' is going to come from exposure in the wild.
In my own experience, word cards are less efficient because they accrue many more reviews - even for languages closely related to my L1 - having higher average difficulty and a higher fail rate. I would hazard a guess that I could review ~20 sentnece cards across my lifespan in the time it takes to learn ~1 non-trivial vocabulary card (ie. not words with zero polysemy, technical terms, things that don't occur in idiosyncratic phrasal constructions with specific converbs/clitics/prepositions/case usage abnormalities or syntactic abnormalities). And you get reinforcement of ~15 other words for free (depending on how long the average sentence is in your TL). I never worry if I end up adding a couple of sentences 'for' a single word.
It's basically targeted re-reading/listening, those being things that one does anyway and which accounts for the bulk of learning vocabulary.
AI is a non-starter for me (personally) in this for two regards:
1) they're awful at most of the languages I've studied at a trivial level.
2) those that they're 'good at' (in terms of grammaticality) they're often just horrible stylistically. I would like to be able to speak/write in a way that is pleasing in nuance/idiom, not just comprehensible.
But if these don't really apply to you or don't match your experience with your TL (they're better with some languages than others), more power to you!
It is nice in but the documentation (or at least the wiki) is inconsistent within itself at times. For all its cruft, neomutt is much more accessible in this regard.
The man pages are better, but in the case of more involved setups with notmuch/isync, one can be left wondering what setting needs to be made to achieve some desired behaviour.
There is also a smaller and shorter pool of users so it can be harder to find troubleshooting info. Eg. I rarely use postpone, but today any time I try to recall a postponed draft I am receiving a crash, which I cannot find any previous examples of, even though I presume recalling a draft while using isync is a common case.
I assume the IRC chats are a good place to address any of these, but I haven't made the time to hop on yet, as I'm not a habitual user of IRC, and as is predictable, I'd like a nice terminal client configured...
The promise of the UI being non-blocking is not entirely true. In many cases some operation blocks the UI. Eg. deleting a large amount of mails is not using async I/O.
The threading UI is nice. Does neomutt have that these days?
I would guess neomutt probably still has the edge in raw extensibility or at least cases where that extensibility is more easily discoverable (due to a larger pool of users blazing the trails before you). But you can do a lot in aerc between external editors, filters, your pager, and handlers. And whatever you discover you cannot do, you can likely submit a patch for, if you know go.
That said, Aerc feels more modern in many ways. If I can fix my handful of personal peeves with it, I will be happy enough. I don't need most of the fancier stuff I see some doing in Neomutt. I'll probably check out others like meli and alpine eventually.
One of the most interesting aspects of this software for me is that it autocalculates an urgency score based on various information about the task which is broadly similar to the Eisenhower matrix: whether a task is a dependent or blocking another task, due date, its priority, etc. You can set it to have urgency inheritance, meaning chains of tasks will inherit the urgency score of tasks they block. I use a personal script inspired by a script someone wrote to bump the urgency of tasks if they are due at a time when a lot of other tasks are due. The original one is here, but my own is a bit more involved: https://github.com/00sapo/TWDensity
I find this approach very helpful as someone with diagnosed ADHD. However, it's not a silver bullet. With my habit of putting a lot of things into the list, the urgency scores can sometimes become a bit of a black box, where some stuff that maybe isn't that urgent gets bumped because it blocks something that is. This is of course it working as intended, but it means you can spend more time fiddling with dependencies and modifying the task list than you do... doing things.
It has some rough edges, and lacks a lot of flexibility. For example, how recurrence currently works (though there are some ongoing PRs to address this). Or that your tasks are kind of isolated and hard to link up to notes, files, etc. The list based view in general is not ideal for many kinds of project.
I've tried many other todo tools from kanban boards to things like amazing marvin, and this is really the only one that stuck. Sometimes I neglect interacting with it for a long time and use paper instead.
If I might, modern people tend to find cursive difficult to read. This depends somewhat on culture (nastaliq is the default in Iran) but is a kind of generalized trend that holds for most modern developed countries (see gyousho and sousho almost disappearing in daily use in Japan outside of menus and signage and - increasingly rarely - formal letters). It's not as if, I think, that when these older forms were more common that people struggled to read them (at least, not anymore than individual handwriting typically causes problems).
People who grew up writing cursive also often struggle with older scribal hand (though less so than someone who did not grow up with cursive), say from 1500s-1700s. Again, I think it's unlikely that the writers of those hands were so constrained by medium and technology (or cultural norms) that they chose to write in a way that was deemed inaccessible. (One might, if not attenuated to it, say that sousho is akin to deliberate cultural obfuscation, but my experience suggests that you quickly learn to recognize the patterns in kuzushiji.)
In the case of CJK scripts, brush pens haven't changed. Fountain pens are perfectly adequate for cursive (though some nibs were developed that differ specifically to make them even more suitable). For nastaliq, as for naskh, a reed pen is fine for both. (Modern pencils, ballpoints, and typical modern Western-tipped FPs do struggle to give nastaliq the line variation needed for a legible result). For Western scripts, pens and their tipping simply hasn't changed much beyond a decrease in the flexibility of nibs in FPs. (Something which also varied historically - pens oriented at most shorthand styles always had hard tips, excluding those shorthand styles that incorporate line-width variation which was meant to be achieved with a flexible tip.)
So my thinking is this is mostly something that comes down to 'are you used to it' and shifts in this area have a lot mroe to do with culture than anything else.
There are of course two other matters.
First, how easy something is to learn - I think the only place this is a consideration is sousho of the scripts I've mentioned (even with nastaliq's hundreds of thousands of possible ligatures).
Second, are the people around you accustomed (culturally) to the hand you are writing in, and how hard is it for them to adapt if they are not. Broadly speaking, people are not accustomed to reading much cursive in general these days, let alone one that varies from the recent hands of the area. So generally if one is writing for coworkers say, one would do well to simply write in print or at most a semi-cursive style.
In that regard the more that something deviates from its print form, the harder it will be to read for them. This ultimately comes down to interpersonal consideration - if you're writing for yourself or people who are regularly reading/writing cursive, I don't think the author's changes will be a significant issue beyond a short acclimatization phase that does not extend far beyond the phase that would be needed to adapt to an individual's personal quirks in a hand that has had some recent sway in the local area (and those hands do differ by country/area, quite a lot). (As a tangent, some of these tricks of the author's are commonplace in specific historical European hands.)