Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Homely Mutt

stevelosh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 116 posts

Re: The Homely Mutt

#51

Post by jvehent »

Karunamon wrote: post #49

There's one and only one reason that I haven't ever switched to a terminal based email client.. HTML messages. I want to see images and formatted text, not an unholy mess of tags and other detritus the program can't render. As much as I like Alpine, being stuck on the terminal is a total deal breaker. It's 2012 ferchrissakes - why are we using email tech that's stuck in the 80s? Why does "modern" have to be at consta…

MIME html emails will have a plain text part that will be displayed properly. For pure HTML, you can always have mutt open them in a web browser.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#52

Post by rbellio »

ajross wrote: post #36
rbellio wrote: post #32

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it ou…

"We" (meaning not you, apparently) are still doing that kind of thing because we know we'll spend thousands of days using the tool, so a few hours spend leaning it seems like a bargain. I could just as easily ask why "we" (meaning you) are still getting confused between "discoverability" and "usability" after decades of silly arguments like this. Don't use mutt, that's fine. But come up with some better justification…

I put time in when I feel like the tool may solve an issue or problem I have and when I think there will be a ROI for the time I spend doing it.

This seems like a pretty reasonable justification to me. Having spent a lot of time authoring emails in different tools, I'm comfortable with what I have. If what I have does what I want and the other tool that people are telling me is better has a disclaimer like the above, then what exactly am I doing wrong?

I'm all for trying out new tools and I spend hours doing so every week. I have to pick and choose what it is that I utilize. I wasn't arguing that the tool might not be valuable for some folks, just that it did a very good job of un-selling me, very quickly.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#53

Post by Karunamon »

jvehent wrote: post #51
Karunamon wrote: post #49

There's one and only one reason that I haven't ever switched to a terminal based email client.. HTML messages. I want to see images and formatted text, not an unholy mess of tags and other detritus the program can't render. As much as I like Alpine, being stuck on the terminal is a total deal breaker. It's 2012 ferchrissakes - why are we using email tech that's stuck in the 80s? Why does "modern" have to be at consta…

MIME html emails will have a plain text part that will be displayed properly. For pure HTML, you can always have mutt open them in a web browser.

A terminal still can't render images. Unless you're doing some level of framebuffer shenanigans, that is, but I'd wager most people work on a GUI with terminal windows, not full screen terminal VTYs.

We've got this wonderful invention called the graphical user interface.. why not leverage it?

Re: The Homely Mutt

#54

Post by rbellio »

3amOpsGuy wrote: post #34
rbellio wrote: post #32

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it ou…

Valid point and I fall into this camp for all sorts of key software (e.g. you'd never catch me spending more than 5 mins tweaking a new web browser). For other software, e.g. my editor, my mail client - software i'm producing content in, rather than consuming, i'll happily put in a few hours up front to get comfortable on the grounds that i will reap a greater reward in time saved medium term.

If I could have seen that there would have been some value outside of what I currently use, I'd totally look into it. I too am more likely to spend some time messing around with editors, IDEs and other tools than I am email clients though.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#55

Post by repiret »

jvehent wrote: post #51
Karunamon wrote: post #49

There's one and only one reason that I haven't ever switched to a terminal based email client.. HTML messages. I want to see images and formatted text, not an unholy mess of tags and other detritus the program can't render. As much as I like Alpine, being stuck on the terminal is a total deal breaker. It's 2012 ferchrissakes - why are we using email tech that's stuck in the 80s? Why does "modern" have to be at consta…

MIME html emails will have a plain text part that will be displayed properly. For pure HTML, you can always have mutt open them in a web browser.

MIME html emails should have a plain text part that will be display properly and should contain essentially the same content.

One or both of those fail often enough that I have mutt set to display the HTML part, using w3m to render it as text.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#56

Post by rbellio »

aliukani wrote: post #45
rbellio wrote: post #32

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it ou…

Am I supposed to eschew powerful tools because there wasn't a UX guy involved in the project? If I cared that much about ease of configuration, I'd use Textmate instead of Vim, and Colloquy instead of irssi.

This is my fault for not explaining why I wasn't going to look into it more. According to the features it has listed, it offers me no obvious advantages to my current tools and claims to be difficult to setup and configure.

Beyond that, if you truly want adoption for a tool, you'd invest time into making sure that you remove the obstacles of someone utilizing it. This is a tool that hasn't had any major releases since "September 15, 2010" and hasn't had any commits for two months.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#57

Post by dcope »

WayneDB wrote: post #41

"...it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." The advantages were never enumerated. Most of the article was spent teaching you how to program ^H^H^H configure the thing. What are the advantages?

The biggest advantage for me, personally, is that it's so customizable and open source. Every last aspect can be tweaked to my liking.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#58

Post by bitwize »

jvehent wrote: post #51
Karunamon wrote: post #49

There's one and only one reason that I haven't ever switched to a terminal based email client.. HTML messages. I want to see images and formatted text, not an unholy mess of tags and other detritus the program can't render. As much as I like Alpine, being stuck on the terminal is a total deal breaker. It's 2012 ferchrissakes - why are we using email tech that's stuck in the 80s? Why does "modern" have to be at consta…

MIME html emails will have a plain text part that will be displayed properly. For pure HTML, you can always have mutt open them in a web browser.

Recent versions of Exchange strip off the plain text part as a default.

Your company's IT staff probably can't be arsed to change the default, if you can so easily change your email client instead.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#59

Post by sliverstorm »

rbellio wrote: post #32

"Mutt certainly isn’t the prettiest email client around, and its setup/configuration process is one of the ugliest out there. But once you get it set up it’s got a lot of advantages over many other email clients." Stopped reading, right there. Why are we still fighting with things that are difficult/ugly to setup/configure? Could have been the best tool ever written, but if I have to spend a half a day figuring it ou…

Something difficult to set up and/or configure can still be worth the suffering. Sure, it'd be great if it was easy to configure to boot, but sometimes pain now can reap greater payback down the line...
Post reply on HN