[geeks] Speaking of Mozilla.....

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Kurt Mosiejczuk wrote:

> > You could always use a MUA that sucks less... http://www.mutt.org
>
> I tried mutt after using pine for years.  The UI is crap.

I've had this argument with friends numerous times.  I've been using
PINE for nine years, pausing only briefly to use Eudora for work-mail
three jobs ago and while at Rice.

Mutt, while I'm sure it's a glorious MUA is user-hostile for a couple of
reasons:

  1) No IMAP indexing/caching.  My inbox is huge.  While this is
     partially my fault, mutt takes more than a minute to open it,
     whereas PINE takes about 10 seconds.

  2) Configuring a MUA (supposedly an easy-to-use one) solely by
     editing a .rc file is laughable.  If I wanted something that
     primitive, I'd use MH.

> Now, don't think I'm saying it's ugly because it's not graphical.

I'm totally with you there.  One of the reasons I like Eudora is because
it's only graphical enough to handle the host system's UI.  It's very
much a keyboard-oriented, text-heavy MUA.

> It's ugly because different keys mean different things at different
> times.  And the same function is a different keypress at different
> times.

Yep.

Mutt users will tell you that's configurable.  They're right, but it
involves studying TFM and invoking $EDITOR and restarting mutt and
waiting over a minute for it to open my inbox.  Whee.  Fun.

> I seem to recall that you can re-map some of those keys, but frankly,
> re-mapping should be for power users, not basic users.

If you have to tweak the UI to streamline it (presumably so that the
defaults are easier), that's perfectly fine.  If you have to tweak the
UI to make it -usable-, that's unacceptable.  Mutt drifts very closely
to the latter of the two.

Even with the PINE-like keyboard bindings, I still can't get used to it.
I'll stick with PINE, and either wait for them to fix the stuff that
really annoys me or fix it myself.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Some people grow out of the petty theft of
Elgin, TX         (   childhood.  Others grow up to be CEOs and
USA                )  politicians."                    --Phorist