On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 04:20:09PM -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 08:05:52PM +1000, Erik Christiansen wrote: > > On 12.04.16 13:05, Derek Martin wrote: > > > On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 05:28:08PM +1000, Erik Christiansen wrote:
> > > > The really big benefit of the Unix approach is that the same > > > > utility know-how can be applied to every problem, as it is only > > > > the mix of utilities used, and their parameters, which vary. > > > The downside is that typical users don't want to learn all those > > > tools, and by and large have no reason to. They use the web and > > > e-mail, and very little else. > If your software can save your user base gobs of configuration time > and learning curve, and simplify your tasks with a uniform, consistent > interface, how is that EVER a bad thing? Is that not actually the > entire point of software? Frankly, I know a number of people who have > moved on from Mutt cheifly because they were dissatisfied with its > search capabilities. And these are system programmers and > sysadmins--hardly the typical user. So clearly, just because it works > for YOU, doesn't mean it should be sufficient for everyone. > > The Unix Philosophy is a wonderful generalized solution, but it's well > understood that a specialized solution CAN be more efficient, and > provide additional usability and other benefits as well. I do agree with this, for the most part. While Mutt is definitely a project that appeals to techy sorts, and while the "building blocks" approach has a lot of benefits, there are times where the lack of tight integration becomes a problem. With search, especially, I think that's the case. I tried to setup Mairix with Mutt a long time ago, and found that it was way too kludgy to really be useful in the same way that the search in most GUI MUAs is. As mentioned before, using grep or Mutt's single mailbox search tends to work well for me in most cases, I also occasionally use my iPhone to search mail. Being able to do searches across all mailboxes directly within Mutt (ideally with some subset of the 'simple patterns'), especially over IMAP, would probably be a useful feature to many. I'm not as much worried about bloat, especially if it's an optional feature, but it seems like something that would be fairly difficult to implement in a way that is both fast and useful. For me, the bigger areas where I find Mutt limiting are things like responding to Exchange / Gcal invites (though mostly just use Apple products for this now), not being able to view images inline, etc. Given how much less email is used these days (relative to text message, Facebook messaging, online forums / FB groups, Slack, etc.), the emails I *do* still get tend to be weighted more heavily in this direction than they used to be. That said, I still much prefer Mutt over GUI MUAs. w
