There was another poster who suggested that mutt has remained stagnant at a time when other mail clients are moving forward. Speaking for myself, it seems that mutt's authors have created a client that does about everything that can be done with a console-based mailer.
On the other hand, however, I think there's truth in the notion that the Internet has progressed to a point at which mutt's selling points are perhaps not as compelling as they may have been some years ago.
You have to learn a certain amount about how computers and the Internet work in order to get the most out of mutt. This is by no means a bad thing. But I am starting to wonder about the ratio of payback to investment. The reason is that I've been fiddling for several days trying to get mutt to send and retrieve gmail properly and I guess I will eventually get it, but I couldn't help notice that, while I took a break in working on mutt, I was able to configure Kmail to do the job in about 90 seconds. Now, maybe mutt will eventually save me time on my daily e-mail work--I don't know enough about it to say for sure. But I have to wonder if that speculative savings will outweigh the time I've invested in figuring out how to get it to work in the first place.
This is not a criticism of mutt so much as it is just thinking aloud to myself. I don't know the answer. I DO know that, for most people today, the Internet and e-mail are mainly tools to accomplish something else. For me, it's freelance writing. For another person I know, it's designing gardens; for another, it's ornithological research, etc. If your life and your career impel you to focus mainly on some other job with (for example) e-mail as a tool to help you do it, you naturally want to spend most of your time on your final goal, whatever it might be. Robert Frost would have been bemused if somebody said he had to learn about paper manufacture and how to make pencils before he could write poetry. After all, a tool is a tool, the number of hours in your life is finite, and circumstances force us to triage our time in the most productive way. I'm just wondering if the evolving state of the Internet has decreed that mutt is henceforth to be an enthusiasm of hobbyists and specialists. I don't know. But other mail clients have gotten so easy and feature-packed that I have to wonder...
Seth Williamson Slings Gap Franklin County, VA chrisisbd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 03:16:59PM +0200, Shehu Dikko wrote:
Gary Johnson <garyjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Making mutt easier for newbies to use and to understand is a great idea, but changing variable and function names is not the way to do it. If you really want to help new users, add a section to the manual where variables are grouped functionally along the lines of your ideas for renaming them, and improve the rest of the manual by making the explanations more clear and with better cross-references.
First of all, it's a pleasant surprise to learn that mutt is attracting new users. How did we know this? I was under the impression that newbies went for gui-based programs. Have I missed a similar poll of newbies done to discover what specific difficulties they've faced? Just what is driving this review? That said, anyone interested enough to try mutt should be willing to read and understand the documentation. What Gary says here should not be overlooked. Variable names in of themselves mean nothing if they are not properly documented and understood.
Surely 'new user' is not the same as 'newbie'.