Re: Musings on debian-user list
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:14:55AM EDT, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 06:47:55PM -0400, Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com> was heard to say:
[..]
> > The only thing I find "frustrating" about mutt is that it is impossible
> > to view more than one message at a time - you actually have to fire up a
> > second instance of mutt to achieve this.
> >
> > What else?
>
> (1) mutt's support for cross-folder operations is fairly limited.
> You can view multiple folders by running multiple mutts, but you
> can't do operations that require accessing two at once, such as
> cross-folder searches ("where did I put that email from John last
> Tuesday?").
I tend to be over-organized - IOW, I spend/waste way too much time
organizing.. :-) so, this kind of thing practically never happens to me.
True-blood mutters would probably argue that nothing stops you from
switching to a shell and using grep on the root of your email repository
to find what you are looking for.. or bind a script/macro if you need
to somewhat automate and regularly repeat the process using the
capabilities of mutt's pipe command.
Oh.. your email is not local..?? well despite the imap:// and pop://
recent evolutions, you may be using the wrong MUA.
There is also and add-on called "mairix" that lets you enhance mutt's
base functionalities, although I removed it from my system mostly
because I did not really need it.. but mostly because on top of that, it
was modifying my mboxes' atimes, thus messing up the notion of new mail
in the folder list, the "N" flag.
> (2) Since mutt runs its editor as an external program, there's no way
> to quote more messages than you started with. If you get halfway
> through a long email and then realize you wanted to quote some
> other messages, you have to blow up the mail and restart
> (hopefully saving it somewhere) -- or of course copy the message
> in and quote it by hand.
True, you have to "tag" the messages first.. and then launch the editor
on the messages' concatenation.
I once thought that among other comforts, this could be addressed in a
more effective way, if mutt had some split-screen capability that lets
you navigate to other messages and view them in a separate viewport
where you could use X's or gnu/screen's copy/paste capabilities to
extract whatever is relevant to your current task.
I was informed in no uncertain terms by the mutt community that this was
a clear case of bloat advocacy and since I could not myself come up with
the code to provide such an enhancement, I left it at that.
> (3) mutt takes *ages* to load large folders, particularly if they're
> maildir based. ISTM that an on-disk index would be a sensible
> idea here.
I use the mbox format and I do find that some of my folders take a while
to load. Probably not as bad as with the maildir format.. but on my slow
machine it is quite noticeable.
But, after thinking about this on several occasions, I pretty much came
to the conclusion that since I only rarely take a look at messages that
are older than, say.. a month old, this may be mutt's way of telling me
that I should set up a cron job that moves older emails to monthly
archive trees to keep performance under control.
I'm not saying your suggestion does not have merit.. but it's the old
dilemma.. feature or bloat..?
Thanks,
CJ
Reply to: