Pine vs mutt

[Aldo]

Hello,

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 11:29:00AM -0500, Tim Chase wrote:
> pine is to pico/nano as mutt is to vi/vim/emacs

I use to combine Mutt with Nano, and now with Joe, since I found Joe being a
very easy/useful and powerfull enough editor.
 
> Pine (and pico/nano) is/are easy to approach for the uninitiated, 
> and get the basics done and a small handful of more advanced 
> features.

Idem for Mutt+Nano/Mutt+Joe.
 
> Mutt (and vi/vim/emacs) has/have a much steeper learning curve, 
> but also afford far more power to the user that's willing to 
> invest the time to learn them.  They also allow for far more 
> customization to your own whims, allowing you to do 
> crazy-powerful things.  To further the analogy, I'd compare Mutt 
> to vi/vim, and Thunderbird to XEmacs...vi/vim/mutt are svelte but 
> a bit obscure while Thunderbird and XEmacs hog more resources and 
> are a bit more approachable for the newbie.

Maybe you can Google with keywords like "example+.muttrc" or
".muttrc+template": IMHO the problem of Mutt is that it isn't configurable
by a Menu function as under Pine; 
but its easy when you find some good tempalte to refer to.

(Note: for the editor you can set it inside .muttrc by adding:
set editor=joe
to ~/.muttrc
that's all)
 
> I haven't yet made the jump to Mutt, but not for want to learn 
> it.  

I have both on my Debian systems:
Mutt is by default,
Pine does also exist as .deb package here:
http://ftp2.de.freebsd.org/pub/linux/pine
I mostly use Mutt for mail, Pine only for nntp.
Both are interesting and blindfriendly applications.

Aldo.