>>If Netscrape had keyboard commands, you might use that instead?<<
Hell no!
With netscape I have to use statically-linked Motif toolkit, which adds to memory usage and startup time. Netscape doesn't handle PGP signing as well. Netscape is not nearly as customizable as mutt.
With mutt I can customize every single keystroke, as well as the layout and behavior of the program. You can assign actions to incoming or outgoing mail based on any regexp. Mutt handles mailing lists well, and threads. Mutt can use many different mailbox formats (including reading Netscape Mail format). Mutt allows me to read my mail even if I'm stuck on a Win95 machine with only a telnet client. Mutt is fast. Mutt is great. Mutt is good. Long live mutt.
The downside:
Mutt has a steeper learning curve than NSMail and has a config file longer than an E.Charters/X-Windows rant.
I don't think Netscape (or any GUI mail client) will give me these capabilities anytime soon. What I *would* like to see is a "gmutt" that is similar in concept to "gvim". Basically, it would give you menus on top of a terminal window that had dialogs and other GUI tools to set up the config file for mutt, but still would allow you to use mutt by itself when the menus aren't needed. This would allow you to recommend mutt to newbies.
Although I don't think that text-based programs are going to be the "future", I _do_ think that "interface-independance" will be a driving factor in programs. For example: I think the gnumeric spreadsheet is nice, I would like to also see a text-based program that used the gnumeric backend, or at least read the same data files and had the same capabilities. I seem to remember doing things in the text-based Lotus 123 faster (using a 386) than I could do the equivalent in newer versions of Excel (using a Pentium). Having a choice is important. Having open data-file formats is important to being able to have that choice. |
