mutt

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

Andreas, a message of hope for you...all is not lost, persistence pays
off :-)

On Wed, Dec 08, 1999 at 08:06:35AM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Also a "pine-like" mutt would be fine.  Sometimes I considered to
> switch to mutt, but it was a short attempt.  Why should I switch from
> a program which does all tasks I want to do and is comfortable enough?
> Why should I learn a new UI and new configuration tools?

that was exactly my attitude up until about a year ago. i had used pine
for years, but wasn't happy with it being non-free, and i was vaguely
aware that mutt was supposed to be "better". there were also a few dumb
things i disliked about pine but i was used to them so they didn't
bother me too much (e.g. most useful features were disabled by default,
supposedly to make it easier for newbies...a pain when you read mail on
several different systems).

anyway, like you i made a few attempts to switch from pine to mutt, but
gave up because i didn't want the "downtime" of learning a new mailer,
and my fingers had the pine keybindings hard-coded into them the same
way vi keybindings are hard-coded :)

about a year or so ago, i decided to force myself to use mutt. it took
me about 3 days, and it was hard going. unlearning old habits is harder
than learning new ones.

however, it was worth it. mutt IS better than pine in a number of ways.
it has much better searching and tagging features (regexps rule!), has
better support of multiple folders and incoming folders, is faster and
uses MUCH less memory (important when you have mailbox files >= 5MB).

now that i've got used to mutt, it is pine that feels really clumsy. and
slow. i'd never go back to pine now.


One feature i really like is that you can embed commands into your
~/.muttrc, e.g.:

    # incoming folders
    mailboxes \
              /var/spool/mail/cas \
              ~/mail/potential-junkmail \
              `find ~/Mail ~/mail -name "*incoming" | xargs echo `

that automatically adds any filename ending in "incoming" to my
mailboxes list. i no longer have to edit my ~/.pinerc every time i
subscribe to a new mailing list.

mutt's colour support is good, as is its pgp and gpg support (not that i
sign messages very often).



SUMMARY:

mutt's cool.  mutt has heaps of great features.  mutt is free.

it is a pain to switch from pine to mutt, especially if you've been
using pine for a few years...but the effort IS worth it.

mutt's actually fairly easy to learn for newbies...it's only those who
already know pine who have any difficulty.  OTOH, it's easy for those
who know elm.


one question:

is it true that mutt is called "mutt" because it pisses on pine and elm? :)


> This is the real crux, not the editor.

true.  but most people who use pine use the built-in pico editor.  

> This mail was written with vim and send using pine ...

that's what i used to do too...I still use vim now that i'm using mutt,
and i even get to edit the message headers with vim too (due to mutt's
"set edit_headers" option)

craig

ps: i tried the pine-like keybindings for mutt at first. i gave up on
them - mutt isn't enough like pine for them to work IMO. decided that it
was better to learn mutt's "native" keybindings.

pps: back on to the real topic of this thread.  IMO it would be better
to focus energy on making mutt's pine emulation better than on cloning
pine....but i'm not going to work on either so my opinion isn't worth
much.

--
craig sanders