[SlugLUG] mail client wars?

[Peter Belew]

Regarding mutt and its competitors:

On 10/1/06, Thomas Leavitt <thomas at thomasleavitt.org> wrote:
> ah, that shows how long it's been since I've operated 24/7 in a
> character based terminal environment - i split my time (at the moment)
> between a laptop running windows 2000, and my Mandriva 2006 desktop
> which had KDE on it... most of my time in a text mode environment is
> spent messing around on the server, administering it...
>
> i get the impression that mutt is the default choice for character mode
> email at this point

On my ISP's shell server, the choices are mutt and pine. At this moment
2 people are using pine and 8 are using pine, making mutt 4 times as
popular - right now.  (That's sonic.net in Santa Rosa). I use mutt, having
started out on cruzio.com and later sonic.net using elm, which is
somewhat similar to mutt but no longer maintained.

For simple text editors, people use pico, nano, and joe, mainly.

A reflection about emacs - its simpler editing commands have an ancestry
going to the shell for the TENEX operating system for the BBN-modified
virtual memory version of the PDP-10 (written by a team of 4 at BBN),
and possibly to early OSes written by DEC or for DEC machines. Related
to those command sets are the line editor in the BASH shell, one for
Cisco routers' IOS, and the 'info' manual system used for some Linux
software. Note that emacs and lisp come from MIT, which had a close
relationship with DEC in DEC's early years.

- Peter

>
> thomas
>
> Peter Belew wrote:
> > What about mutt? - I switched to that when my ISP stopped
> > supporting elm.
> >
> > - Peter
> >
> > On 9/30/06, Thomas Leavitt <thomas at thomasleavitt.org> wrote:
> >> pico comes with pine (a non "free" program)
> >>
> >> which inspires this thought:
> >>
> >> what's your favorite text mode mail reading program?
> >>
> >> i've missed elm's super easy keyboard short cuts for slicing and dicing
> >> my mailbox and its speed and efficiency ever since i switched over to a
> >> gui mail client... it was so easy and FAST to input a regex select or
> >> mark mail for deletion, etc. plus, of course, having vi as my default
> >> editor was great... as far as I can tell, it isn't supported / developed
> >> any longer... i had to dig pretty hard to find a copy of it for Mandriva
> >>
> >> is there a gui email client that has this type of functionality?
> >>
> >> a lot of the less sophisticated employee users at my web hosting company
> >> were more comfortable using pine and pico for some reason, than elm
> >> and vi
> >>
> >> thomas
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >>
>
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