[Sussex] Mail client suggestions

[Colin Tuckley]

steve at dobson.org wrote:

>   Compare the search and replace functionality.  With GUIs 
> you get a box that allows the input of the string to search for and
> the string to replace (and some other minor options like direction or
> case sensitivity).

This is a sweeping over generalisation!

AND

more importantly it's the sort of statement that Windows users who are
considering using Linux see and then think "Arrogant buggers, I don't think
I'll bother"

So - here in the public forum we need to adopt a much more tolerant attitude
to things like GUIs or we will alienate the people we are trying to move to
Linux.

And, back on topic for editors - I use a GUI text editor quite a lot, it has
syntax hi lighting for almost every programming language I use and is user
extensible. It has search/replace with regular expressions, it has
intelligent (block) cut and paste. AND, shock horror, it runs on Windows!

> All GUI interfaces are limiting.  That's the nature of the beast.

No they are not, most are it is true, but there are some fully featured ones
(for example the Mozilla config file HTML interface).

> I've rejected
> Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) because of the power they take
> away from me.

99% of the time you don't need that power and for that 99% of your time your
productivity is much higher in an IDE.

> Perfect sense.  And thanks for the opening for a rant :-)

Yes, Rant! and this isn't the place for those, here we need to remember that
 there are beginners who want help (and not the RTFM sort of help).

This is the public face of SLUG - we advertise it as such at places like the
Computer Fair - so we had damn well better make it look a friendly helpful
place!

Perhaps we need another mailing list for more complex geek type discussions.

Colin

-- 
Colin Tuckley      |  colin at tuckley.org  |  PGP/GnuPG Key Id
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 There are 10 types of people in the world.
 Those that know binary, and those that don't.