Charlie Kester wrote:
On Thu 04 Feb 2010 at 15:44:08 PST Derek Martin wrote:
It's not that simple. Outlook sucks for a lot of reasons, many of
them technical. Mutt has very few technical weaknesses, but its user
interface is from 3 decades ago. I, and I suspect a lot of people,
would love to see a modern Mutt.
Some of us *prefer* that 30 year-old UI and the "Unix philosophy" way of
doing things.
As somebody else said, you're welcome to fork off a new branch of mutt
where you can implement all the "modern" features you're pining for.
Just leave the rest of us the good old mutt that we know and love, OK?
I'll second that. There are a lot mail clients out there, but my
personal opinion is that mutt sucks less than all of them in large part
due to that clunky 30-year-old interface and the ability to glue in all
those barely-integrated little pieces to do all the stuff Mutt doesn't
do on its own. I like that I can use an MTA that's not hard-wired, that
I can bypass the horrendous built-in IMAP support, and that I can get
really creative with how I handle attachments. I appreciate that nearly
all of the functionality, from the editor I use to compose messages to
the utilities I use to spit them out to various printers when necessary,
are all external tools hand-picked and perfectly suited toward doing
what I want them to do.
I don't want an MUA that does everything one way, and if Mutt was one of
those, I wouldn't be using it. Yes, a monolithic mutt could be easier
for most people to use; I can't argue with that. But it's also flexible
as hell, and that exactly what I like about it.
Some of us are fans of the interpretation of the Unix philosophy that
includes gluing together a lot of small, purpose-built apps into a
greater (albeit sometimes messy and convoluted) whole. I doubt there's
one of us that'll claim that's what's best for everyone, but it's
definitely the way to go for people like me.
(Disclaimer: I'm on a borrowed laptop at the moment, so don't read the
headers on this one.)
