On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 12:38:56PM -0800, geneb via cctalk wrote:
Before that, I
have been using pine (nowadays named alpine), which had
configuration edited via builtin options editor and before that, elm,
never configured by me (AFAIR - about 20yago). So, with this
perspective, I can say mutt is not bad and I intend sticking to it for
a while.
What about mutt do you prefer over alpine?
Maybe I cannot give one strong argument for mutt over alpine, but:
- I used pine on a "Unix shell" account attached to my address, then
after upgrade I decided to try mutt; alpine is installed but
somehow I never again ran it here
- I still have alpine installed at home "Unix shell account" and use
it for minor mail processing, but for longer reading of my huge
mailboxes mutt feels a bit nicer to me, so I use it
- in mutt, I can press "l" in "mailbox view"/"index view"
and limit
displayed items only to those matching given expression; so for
example, if I want to see only mails with "[name of certain group
in subject]", I can do this - I have first learned about such thing
after switching to mutt, so I have no idea if alpine can do such
trick, too; when I am done I switch back with "l all"
- in mutt, I can send a mail through a preconfigured script in Python
(some kind of preprocessor written by me), which is bound to
certain key; I had no idea how to achieve this in alpine; I
understand I can have more such programs bound to more keys in
mutt, never tried in alpine
- for a while, I used to repair broken threads in my inbox using
mutt's "link thread"; no idea about similar thing in alpine
- I have found out that I really like the 256-color mode; it took me
a bit of trying, and maybe not all colors are nice enough for my
eyes, so I will have to redo some configuration later, but I find
it easier to plow through few hundred mails a day when they are
colored (also, some are colored differently based on certain
properties, like "sent from family member" or "from a buddy" - I
have set it in muttrc, for each member of the group by name or
other factor); perhaps I could color mails based on mailing list,
but I have to try it yet - not sure if it would do me any good,
however.
Please note, I do not claim that alpine cannot do those things. I have
been using mutt while each of the needs arose and have been satisfied
by finding relevant mutt-based solution. I never looked for
alpine-based solution, so my preference for mutt might come from
ignorance. But I am now dug deeply in this hole.
What I dislike about mutt:
- No built-in scripting language, for more advanced mail
processing. But it is not really hard to go around this
limitation, so dislike is not very strong.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at
bigfoot.com **