Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Edward S. Marshall]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 10:36:12AM -0500, Tom Diehl wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, seth vidal wrote:
> And no mutt is not a replacment. It is too different and too hard to
> configure. That is one of the strengths of pine it is simple to setup and
> use. Mutt is not intuitive at all. At least not for me.

I'd agree (and check the headers, I'm a happy Mutt user, although I use
Evolution when I'm sitting at my desk at home).

The problem would appear to be that while the folks building mail clients
like Kmail and Evolution are putting a lot of effort into basic usability,
the folks creating text-mode clients aren't doing the same: it's power
users building for other power users (or as Joel Spolsky put it recently,
programmers writing programs for other programmers).

Pine filled that niche fairly well; plenty to configure if you wanted to,
but the defaults were sane out-of-the-box, and the on-screen help coupled
with context-sensitive help screens everywhere gave the user a lot of
confidence that they wouldn't get stuck.

Mutt, on the other hand, feels more like vi; it's exceptionally efficient,
once you've learned it, but that learning curve isn't an easy one. The
context-sensitive help is self-generating and cryptic, there's very little
in the way of on-screen assistance, and you can't count on the behavior of
the program being the same from system to system (on this OS, the key
mappings are like Pine's; on this machine, you've got color; over here,
the keybindings are emacs-like, etc). The ultra-configurability is a boon
for power users, but it's a pain for someone who just wants to read their
mail remotely.

It's really a shame that the license for Pine is so poorly conceived; as
an example, c-client Maildir patches have been around forever, but the 
Pine team refuses to integrate them, and you can't distribute a patched
version that supports Maildir. :-P

-- 
Edward S. Marshall <esm at logic.net>
http://esm.logic.net/

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.