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Re: mutt intro and docs (was "Re: Evolution honcho ...")



Seth --

...and then orthodox@xxxxxxxxxx said...
% 
...
% But speaking as someone who has been trying to learn the program, I am
% beginning to conclude that the fault in this regard isn't so much with mutt
% itself but with its documentation.  It is not especially friendly to

I think you've hit the nail on the head, and it has come up a number of
times in the past (see the archives for details).  The problem is that
good documentation is hard to write :-)

A few ventures forward, such as the mutt-newbie list and various muttrc
commentings and so forth, have been started, but not many of them have
matured.  I believe there is a section that lists those on the mutt.org
page; if you find one that isn't there, by all means send a note to the
webmaster so that it can be evaluated.

The best thing that anyone could do would be to sit down and take this
bull by the horns and come up with a tutorial complementary to the manual
which would specifically take new users through some basic concepts that
are invisible in other MUAs, explain a muttrc configuration and provide
some handy sample entries (though the system Muttrc file is usually about
right by the time the install has been done; casual users might not even
need a personal muttrc fiel), and then go off and explore the world of
hooks.  Along the way, it shuold incorporate tutorials on the programs
used to get yoru mail (fetchmail or the like), sort your mail (procmail
or the like), compose your mail (vim or the like), and send your mail
(qmail or ssmtp or the like).  Finally, reduce this mammoth presentation
to something manageable without sacrificing all of the newbie guiding
that has gone into it in the first place so that it isn't a terrifying
two hundred page three-week course :-)

If someone wants to pay me for six months of solid work, I could probably
crank out a very acceptable attempt.  Otherwise, I'm afraid, I don't
have the time to dig into such a project (or nearly anything these days,
sadly enough), which is a problem endemic to open source (no, not just
*my* lack of time :-) and "simple mutt info" in particular.  Other than
organizing a project like that, YOU can probably help out the most by
remembering the things that gave you trouble, writing docs for them, and
putting up yet another Mutt Newbie web site (or contributing to an
existing one) to help others.

I can certainly appreciate your position; I came to mutt from elm with
quite a bit of UNIX experience under my belt, so my transition was easy,
but there was a time when I, too, didn't know what UNIX was or how to use
vi.  It's a very real problem and the learning curve is generally very
shallow, and ways to steepen it would be very much appreciated indeed.


Thanks for jumping in! & HAND

:-D
-- 
David T-G
davidtg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://justpickone.org/davidtg/      Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!

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