On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:14:55AM EDT, Daniel Burrows wrote: > On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 06:47:55PM -0400, Chris Jones <cjns1...@gmail.com> > was heard to say:
[..] > > The only thing I find "frustrating" about mutt is that it is impossible > > to view more than one message at a time - you actually have to fire up a > > second instance of mutt to achieve this. > > > > What else? > > (1) mutt's support for cross-folder operations is fairly limited. > You can view multiple folders by running multiple mutts, but you > can't do operations that require accessing two at once, such as > cross-folder searches ("where did I put that email from John last > Tuesday?"). I tend to be over-organized - IOW, I spend/waste way too much time organizing.. :-) so, this kind of thing practically never happens to me. True-blood mutters would probably argue that nothing stops you from switching to a shell and using grep on the root of your email repository to find what you are looking for.. or bind a script/macro if you need to somewhat automate and regularly repeat the process using the capabilities of mutt's pipe command. Oh.. your email is not local..?? well despite the imap:// and pop:// recent evolutions, you may be using the wrong MUA. There is also and add-on called "mairix" that lets you enhance mutt's base functionalities, although I removed it from my system mostly because I did not really need it.. but mostly because on top of that, it was modifying my mboxes' atimes, thus messing up the notion of new mail in the folder list, the "N" flag. > (2) Since mutt runs its editor as an external program, there's no way > to quote more messages than you started with. If you get halfway > through a long email and then realize you wanted to quote some > other messages, you have to blow up the mail and restart > (hopefully saving it somewhere) -- or of course copy the message > in and quote it by hand. True, you have to "tag" the messages first.. and then launch the editor on the messages' concatenation. I once thought that among other comforts, this could be addressed in a more effective way, if mutt had some split-screen capability that lets you navigate to other messages and view them in a separate viewport where you could use X's or gnu/screen's copy/paste capabilities to extract whatever is relevant to your current task. I was informed in no uncertain terms by the mutt community that this was a clear case of bloat advocacy and since I could not myself come up with the code to provide such an enhancement, I left it at that. > (3) mutt takes *ages* to load large folders, particularly if they're > maildir based. ISTM that an on-disk index would be a sensible > idea here. I use the mbox format and I do find that some of my folders take a while to load. Probably not as bad as with the maildir format.. but on my slow machine it is quite noticeable. But, after thinking about this on several occasions, I pretty much came to the conclusion that since I only rarely take a look at messages that are older than, say.. a month old, this may be mutt's way of telling me that I should set up a cron job that moves older emails to monthly archive trees to keep performance under control. I'm not saying your suggestion does not have merit.. but it's the old dilemma.. feature or bloat..? Thanks, CJ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org