Alpine vs mutt?

[Ethan Dicks]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 4:40 PM, Tomasz Rola via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 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,
>>
>> What about mutt do you prefer over alpine?

I started using mutt about 15 years ago when I was asked for "disc 3
of 3" on a Red Hat Linux install and I was curious what was being
pulled from the end of the shelf and it was one and only one package,
mutt.  I decided to see what was up and why I would want it and I
immediately threw out Pine for mutt.  I just found the keyboard
navigation shortcuts to be entirely intuitive (I liked elm but I never
liked Pine) and mutt handled MIME attached files acceptably well for a
textual client.

I've been using web-based MUAs since I switched to Gmail for personal,
and for many corporate e-mail accounts, including at my present
employer.  I haven't used a textual MUA on UNIX/Linux except 'mail'
and mutt since about 2003, but I did use mutt every day from about
2003-2009.

-ethan