[Gllug] is KMAIL a good enough client for gllug?

[Nix]

On Thu, 8 Sep 2005, paul at thinksolution.net prattled cheerily:
> I'm always surprised that people who remember the days of micro's
> dont want to catch up with the rest of the world.

I've moved beyond it. I went through my graphics-freak
ooh-look-it's-GUI-it-must-be-cool phase when I was about fifteen, when
Windows 2 was new and Linux hadn't been thought of. Now I run X as a way
to get tiny fonts and lots of colours and tabbed konsoles and session
management and the occasional bit of GUI here and there, for those
programs which actually benefit from it. (e.g. the book classification
program I'm classifying my library with, Tellico, which can display the
cover of your book if you can't remember what the book looks like.
That's a good use of graphics, because you can't do it with text
at all.)

> In my text I am refering to the look and feel of mutt and the fact
> that things have moved on now. We all own mice

I have one (1) trackball on one of my machines, and either two or six or
fifteen[1] machines wih no mouse, keyboard or display whatsoever. The
only mice I own are in the waste-hardware box in case of trackball
failure (which had better never happen given the amount the combined
keyboard-and-trackball cost me).

Note that moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse is difficult
and slow compared to hopping between keys. Since you *know* you'll be
using the keyboard when using an email program, unless you compose
emails with the mouse, why not stick with the same input device and
speed everything up and reduce RSI? (Composing emails with a pointing
device is not impossible: there are on-screen keyboards for the severely
disabled that work this way, although they're generally not used with a
physical device as inconvenient as a mouse.)

>                                                and theres no need for
> a non graphical interface.

... except if

- you're in maintenance mode and want to look at that old email/news
  post that dammit told you how to fix this problem that's stopping
  you starting X / connecting to the net / mounting /usr (and in
  the last case in particular you really want your mails to be
  accessible without using an email program at all!)
- you're remote and talking over a line too thin to run a large X
  program (as I am now)
- you're trying to minimize mouse use
- you like your xterm's font
- you don't have X on that machine at all (half my virtual machines
  have no X client libraries)

>                            mutt looks and acts like it was designed in
> the 60's.

I'm curious. What makes it look old? Just its use of the keyboard as
a means of invoking commands?

I don't really understand what a `designed in the 90s' program should do
that older programs shouldn't. Should it look just like an MS Windows
program? Ick, no thanks.

The keyboard is a far more flexible input device than the mouse for many
purposes, and I'd rather use it whenever possible. (I have mouse-related
RSI, among other things.  It's amazing how fast one grows to hate many
graphical user interfaces if using a mouse causes burning pain.)

>           That's not a knock - (for mutt fans) - its just I want
> something more modern

I have noticed severe flaws in the user interface of many graphical news
and mail clients. I don't know if this is because of the graphicality,
or just a bad convention, but I note that a lot of them make it hard to
hop from post to post by Just Hitting Space, for instance. This is
utterly critical for both news and mail, and it stuns me that so many
clients don't implement it. One wonders if the authors of those clients
have ever actually read a high- volume mailing list in their client of
choice.

(Some graphical mail clients, thankfully all dead now I think, don't
even support multiple mailboxes! Very few of them support maildir; with
most it's IMAP or nothing. Thankfully dovecot makes it possible to
IMAPize your system without breaking all your *other* mail clients
completely.)


[1] depending on whether you're counting physical turned-on machines,
    all physical machines including obsolete ones that are turned off,
    or all machines you can reach on my internal network including
    virtual ones with no physical existence

-- 
`... published last year in a limited edition... In one of the
 great tragedies of publishing, it was not a limited enough edition
 and so I have read it.' --- James Nicoll
>
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