Re: What am I missing without mutt?
On Sun, Feb 03, 2008 at 07:09:42PM +0200, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen@gmail.com> was heard to say:
> As a thunderbird user, what am I missing by not using mutt? Teach me,
> if it's a better client than I'd love to learn it. I'm not afraid of
> the CLI, and I'm not afraid of VI[M].
For me, the #1 feature of mutt is that it doesn't have delusions of
grandeur. It's a mail reader, and rather than try to make me use a
half-baked reimplementation of an MTA, MDA, mailbox format, editor,
spam filter, address book, and calendar program, it focuses on
gracefully integrating with whatever works for *ME*. You can force a
GUI program to do this, but that never feels like a useful exercise to
me: my goal is "read my email", not "use kmail|evolution|tbird".
The #2 feature is speed and responsiveness, which I think people have
already touched on.
Some cons that annoy me frequently:
* Stack-based interface: mutt's interface is organized around
doing a task which may have sub-tasks, and once you're in a
sub-task you can't get back to the main one without "quitting".
So you can't refer back to a mailbox while composing a message,
unless you add the message onto the postponed list and pull it
back off when you're ready.
Running several instances of mutt in different xterms can
alleviate this somewhat, at the cost of possibly de-syncing
the instances if you aren't careful.
* You can only load one mailbox at once: again, multiple mutts will
help, but it's a bit annoying if you regularly need to consult a
large number of mailboxes containing lots of messages.
* Replying in a single message to messages from several different
folders is either impossible or difficult (I can't recall which
without consulting documentation).
Daniel
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