On Sun, 2003-04-20 at 06:17, rex wrote:
Matt is right, of course: Mutt isn't for everyone.
Reading is only part of the time spent and the GUI MUAs I've tried are slower for me, one reason being that they usually require a lot of mouse movements and I don't like to take my hands off the keyboard. Another reason is that I like "small, sharp, tools." For example, I like aspell and don't want to be forced into using a spell checker that is built-in to the MUA. Likewise, I like to use one editor (Jed) for almost everything. Mutt (of course), makes using GPG/PGP easy, and it also supports mixmaster.
These are all personal choice, although Evolution do also support regexp, and you can get to about all (if not all) functions only using the keyboard.
Hitting 'o' brings up: Sort (d)ate/(f)rm/(r)ecv/(s)ubj/t(o)/(t)hread/(u)nsort/si(z)e/s(c)ore?: My outbox has nearly 25,000 messages in it. Sorting it on any of the options above takes less than a second.
Starting at the 1st message and searching the bodies of all 25,000 messages for a string that appears in only the last message takes slightly over 6 seconds (P3-800 w 512MB). Mutt also does regexp searches.
These actions are all independent of a GUI. The speed differences between is due to the specific implementation of each program and not the fact that it use a GUI or not.
These are some of the reasons I like Mutt. More at http://www.mutt.org
I've got nothing against mutt, I'm sure it is a very fine application, what got me going was the comment that GUI-based mail clients are sloooow. I think this is a not always the case. The fact that something has a GUI, does not always make it magnificently slower than something else. On a PI with 32 MB RAM, there is definitely a difference, but on most current (P3 +) hardware the speed difference is normally not that much. I can live with a few extra milliseconds between actions. I know that there are applications that is better off without a GUI and I also like to use small, efficient programs where I can. Things like grep, awk, cat, etc is simply brilliant. (I have amazed a few Windows users with its power on a few occasions) I have recently freaked out at work, because people added a GUI to server processes when they ported it to Windows - total waste of resources. But, I think it all comes down to what tools people are used to. For instance, I have worked with a guy that use vi, but I am much faster in Nedit than he is in vi. Nedit was the first editor I used on Unix and I am still more comfortable and faster with it than in vi, although I know that vi is a fraction of a second faster than Nedit with most commands, not to mention the Nedit dependency on a X server. Because I can get Nedit on any platform that I have worked on, I have never made the time to properly evaluate something else. I can help myself in vi, because you don't always have X. So, my point: Everything with a GUI is not necessarily slow and the best tool to use is a personal choice. Mutt might have a better spell-checking interface than Evolution, I don't know. I am fairly sure that it is easier to set up a spell checker in Mutt than in Evolution. The spell checker integration in Evolution has been a problem for a long while, but I doubt if it has something to do with the fact that Evolution use a GUI. -- Andre Truter Software Engineer Registered Linux user #185282 ICQ #40935899 AIM: trusoftzaf http://www.trusoft.za.net <-------------------------------------------------> < The box said: Requires Windows 95 or better... > < So I installed Linux > <------------------------------------------------->