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The Homely Mutt

stevelosh.com

61–70 of 116 posts

Re: The Homely Mutt

#62

My dotfiles are online if anyone wants to take a look at the actual configuration I use: https://bitbucket.org/sjl/dotfiles/ https://github.com/sjl/dotfiles

Good post, thanks!

Do you (or anyone else reading this for that matter) have any insight on how gmail -> imap works with labels when a single message has multiple labels? For example an email may be tagged with "clients" "$JOBNAME" and "receipt". Does it put multiple copies of the message in the local cache, or does it do a hard link, or ...?

Re: The Homely Mutt

#64
post #57
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.

Yet I've tried at least twice in the past to fix the sidebar patch, with 0 response from the maintainer. I'm not really interested in trying to push my fixes to each distribution that is using the sidebar patch.

E.g. try various combinations of "help = yes/no" and "status_on_top = yes/no" with the sidebar enabled. It's obvious that someone wrote it just to fit their configuration.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#65
post #60

I love mutt! Unfortunately, I often write emails while looking at another one, which I couldn't make work with mutt. Any ideas?

You could use a terminal multiplexer (tmux, screen, etc) to just split-screen your terminal.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#66
Anyway to make mutt(or any cmd mail reader) use the Mail.app database, stored in ~/Library/Mail? I already have Mail.app configured, and it has downloaded all my gmails accounts into the plain text emlx format? Also have 10gb+ of mail, and rather not have two copies of it.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#67
Anyway to make mutt(or any cmd mail reader) use the Mail.app database, stored in ~/Library/Mail? I already have Mail.app configured, and it has downloaded all my gmails accounts into the plain text emlx format? Also have 10gb+ of mail, and rather not have two copies of it.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#68
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's an unexamined assumption underlying your comments: Namely that because something is terminal-based, it's 'not modern', and that the GUI unambiguously represents progress on all fronts for all uses.

But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple), functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine.

I think it's at least worth considering the possibility that you're asking for is the equivalent of wondering why you can't just have a lighter-than-air balloon made out of lead; the possibility that GUIs might represent progress along some axes (discoverability and approachability) while fundamentally constraining you along others (power, functionality).

Re: The Homely Mutt

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's an unexamined assumption underlying your comments: Namely that because something is terminal-based, it's 'not modern', and that the GUI unambiguously represents progress on all fronts for all uses. But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple), functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine. I think i…

>But consider: in the 30 odd years of GUI prevalence, there has never been an example of a GUI email client as simple (for some value of simple), functional, and powerful-for-power-users, as Mutt and Pine.

That's exactly my point though - why do most email clients suck so bad? Slow and bloated are the most common adjectives thrown around (Outlook, Thunderbird), and if not that, then there's the weird UI's (Eudora, The Bat) - and then there's the terminal clients, while very nice, very fast, very functional, completely ignore all progress made in user interfaces over the past 20 years. (Pine, Mutt)

It's like you have a choice: Modern, Fast, Functional. Pick any two.

This is something I can imagine coding . Give me something like Pine or Mutt that works in a GUI and can render HTML and images, but still "looks" and runs like Pine or Mutt. Imagine it in your head for a moment - the same UI, but instead of html strewn about everywhere, you have actual rendering of html and images (via choose-your-favorite engine, leaning towards Webkit) in the same window.

I don't think that HTML rendering, speed, and functionality are mutually exclusive goals.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#70
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

Can you imagine that software that is around since 1995 is sort of done by now?
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