At 1:15 AM EST on March 7 Will Yardley sent off:
> Sven Guckes wrote:
> >
> > mutt does not strive to be popular with everyone. after all, all
> > those bad mailers were written to *fit* some people - and they
> > certainly do! so dont take them away from those - they deserve it!
>
> i think this statement is a bit elitist.... simply because a tool is
> powerful doesn't mean that it can't also be fairly easy to use. it can
> be overwhelming to be faced with all that power at once; however that
> doesn't mean that the tool isn't still worth using.
Whether or not any of us are elitist, don't we all encounter times when *we're*
frustrated by the problems with the other person's MUA? PGP/GPG is the biggest
one, I think. If everyone else used mutt, the problem *might* go away. OK,
I'm being optimistic, but I don't see any point in complaining about lack of
PGP/MIME, or full quoting under the reply, or persistent HTML mails, and then
not encouraging the perpetrators to use something better.
> i was thinking about this in the car tonight, and i realized that
> (AFAIK) there isn't a simple interactive command line program to help
> new users adjust to / configure mutt.
>
> such a program could easily be written as a shell script or a perl
> script... and could be included in the mutt distribution, or in the
> contrib/ directory.
I vote for python, simply because perl can get unreadable. It may not matter
since I doubt anything too complicated is necessary.
> it could also ask if the user is used to other programs (ie pine) and
> offer to make the keybindings more familiar.
or emacs/the eVIl one. On the other hand, there's a case for not letting
newbies switch mass keybindings around. As it is, I've seen some
misunderstandings on this list along the lines of
Q> How do I do X?
A> Press Ctrl-h.
Q> But that does Y!
(where Y could be "rm -f *" or "<launch_nuclear_missiles>", available from an
obscure patch.)
A> It works for me!
Q> But not for me!
B> One of you is using nonstandard keybindings, and forgot.
Q> Oh yeah.
I think it's better to make newbies switch keybindings one at a time, and to
make them do the work themselves so that they're aware of the consequences.
> it might also look at environment variables and the answers to previous
> questions in order to give sensible default choices (ie if $MAIL is set
> to /var/mail/william, that's probably a good choice for 'mbox'; if
> ~~/mail exists but ~/Mail doesn't, setting folder to ~/mail is probably a
> good idea;
This is really important. It could also look in ~/.procmailrc for all 2
netscape/pine users that use procmail ;-). Maybe /etc/sendmail.cf could be
parsed to find out where it puts mail for ${USER}?
> if $EDITOR or $VISUAL is set to nano, then perhaps 'nano -t'
> would be the default selection offered for 'editor').
Why not just $VISUAL if running-X, else $EDITOR?
--
* THREENYM: Referring to someone by the first letter of their three names.
Used by some people (RMS and ESR), but not others (has anybody ever
tried to refer to Linus Torvalds as "LBT"?). - fortune
Robert I. Reid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/
PGP Key: http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/pgp.html
