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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