The Homely Mutt • Hacker News Board

Re: The Homely Mutt

#91

Post by yason » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 8:10 AM UTC

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…

I use Alpine precisely because it's text based and email is text. Alpine fits the task perfectly and it's quick to command with its keyboard shortcuts. Things make more sense this way and everything stays within its own appropriate scope.

For HTML emails I have configured a "printer" in Alpine that unpacks the HTML part and all relevant images and attachments and writes them to disk, finally launching my web browser to show the HTML file. But I generally just view the HTML email through Alpine's own text conversion and only fire up the full version if the email has important-looking images such as graphs. Mostly the images are just header/footer logos and stuff like that, I don't need them.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#92

Post by kapowaz » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 8:38 AM UTC

tmhedberg wrote: post #39

kapowaz wrote: post #27

> Now that Sparrow is effectively dead Sparrow 1.6.4 was released on September 11, 2012. Mutt 1.5.21 was released on September 15, 2010. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

As when Knuth stopped releasing new versions of TeX because it reached a point where it was "done", software that has been around for long enough can eventually mature to the point where there's nothing left to add without expanding the scope of the project beyond its original definition. Mutt may simply be at that point. I use Mutt as my primary MUA in a very similar manner to the author of the article, and I can't…

I knew if I made this joke I'd get a wall of text explaining why I was wrong; thanks, HN — you delivered!

On a more serious note, I use Sparrow every day. About the only quibble I have with it is some of the icons aren't retina versions (hardly a dealbreaker). Otherwise I'd say it meets my needs very well; doesn't that also make it ‘done’, rather than ‘effectively dead’?

Re: The Homely Mutt

#93

Post by callahad » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 9:01 AM UTC

I use a similar setup, but I've been bitten by having Mutt and OfflineIMAP accessing the same Maildir concurrently. So instead, I run a local copy of Dovecot to expose a local IMAP server that both Mutt and OfflineIMAP talk to my Maildir through. This also means that I can trivially set up things like Thunderbird or MacBiff, using the same local IMAP server. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#94

Post by tlvince » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 9:29 AM UTC

callahad wrote: post #93

I use a similar setup, but I've been bitten by having Mutt and OfflineIMAP accessing the same Maildir concurrently. So instead, I run a local copy of Dovecot to expose a local IMAP server that both Mutt and OfflineIMAP talk to my Maildir through. This also means that I can trivially set up things like Thunderbird or MacBiff, using the same local IMAP server. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

I'd recommend compiling mutt without POP3/IMAP/SMTP support for this reason. I use this approach in [mutt-kiss][1] (Arch Linux AUR package). [1]: https://github.com/tlvince/pkgbuild/tree/master/mutt-kiss

Re: The Homely Mutt

#95

Post by davvid » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 10:26 AM UTC

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?

What are the advantages?

One advantage: you can configure mutt to behave just like vim (as far as shortcut keys go).

If you don't use vim you won't understand. If you do use vim, having mutt use vim for editing combined with vim-ish hotkeys makes for a very powerful, simple, and enjoyable tool.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#96

Post by huskyr » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 10:33 AM UTC

endgame wrote: post #81

This is exactly the sort of article I want to see on HN. It's thorough, and instead of dropping a pile of dotfiles on github and saying "here you go", Steve goes through everything and explains what's what and why.

"Coming Home to Vim" is a pretty good post too from Steve:

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/

Re: The Homely Mutt

#97

Post by kerneis » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 10:42 AM UTC

tmhedberg wrote: post #39

kapowaz wrote: post #27

> Now that Sparrow is effectively dead Sparrow 1.6.4 was released on September 11, 2012. Mutt 1.5.21 was released on September 15, 2010. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

As when Knuth stopped releasing new versions of TeX because it reached a point where it was "done", software that has been around for long enough can eventually mature to the point where there's nothing left to add without expanding the scope of the project beyond its original definition. Mutt may simply be at that point. I use Mutt as my primary MUA in a very similar manner to the author of the article, and I can't…

Mutt has plenty of unfixed bugs, just look at the bug tracker and distro-specific patches (in Debian for instance). It is a wonderful piece of software, I use it daily, but its development definitely miss momentum.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#98

Post by fafner » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 11:01 AM UTC

I recommend mu (http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/) to search emails. It can be integrated with mutt. But if you are an Emacs user then it even provides a mail client (mu4e).

And you can write scripts for it in Guile.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#99

Post by lysium » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 11:07 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #78

lysium wrote: 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 can launch a compose session from any terminal. "mutt -s 'subject line'" will prompt for recipient(s) and drop you into an editor for composing. You can even pipe output straight to mutt: df ¦ mutt -s "disk utilization" foo@example.com

Hm, I might follow that idea (open in a new terminal window or split screen). I'd somehow have to get the original message as a quote for the new message.

Re: The Homely Mutt

#100

Post by borplk » Tue, Oct 02, 2012, 12:25 PM UTC

rbellio wrote: post #56

aliukani wrote: post #45

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…

As silly as it sounds I think most of these tools are just being overly appreciated by a group who (at least sub-consciously) think of themselves as cool/badass for having some hacker-style terminal in front of them, you know it's true.

Hit me all you want, but the same applies to Vim and Emacs for a large percentage of people who admire these tools.

People religiously defend them just because they are 20 something year old terminal GNU/Unixy programs.

If someone came up with Vim today, with a slick polished GUI interface, etc... you'd find far less people talking about how great it is and you'd find the same people who are appreciating them today, making fun of it.

I know that's a generalisation and doesn't involve everyone but I think it is not insignificant.

There are a minority who use and need the tool and appreciate it for what it is and have been long time users. For every 1 of those people, there are thousands more who simply follow the teachings of the cult to be in the cool nerds club.

There seems to be a pattern here, a recipe for a shitty (once useful) program that is no longer relevant that a group just doesn't want to let it go.

It kinda goes like this,

1. Be a 20-something year old program written by some GNU/Unix kernel/hardcore/early developer

2. Run in terminal with a million options and parameters

3. Be extensible with all sorts of weird text file configs, plugins etc...

4. Have a short weird-sounding name that is an abbreviation of some other weird phrase

That's all you need. Then no matter how terrible the user experience is and how outdated and irrelevant your program has become, you'll always have that cult who religiously love your program and insist on extending it so it can be a space shuttle as well as a text editor and an email client.

I should point out I'm not mocking any application in particular and I think many of these tools were fantastic for their times and some of them are still quite good today but my rant is towards this obsessive religious overly-appreciative culture of praising these softwares.

We are past that age of black screens and terminals and horrible user experiences. They were fine for their times but not anymore. I'm not gonna put up with an application that is almost as old as myself and spend hours to configure it just to be a little more efficient.

The efficiency argument seems more like an excuse, because you don't want to admit that you are putting up with the downsides of the application because of all other nerd-culture reasons.