command-line and curses apps still better than any GUI stuff

scumola · Post by **scumola** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:35 am

For the longest time I've been a command-line guy. I'm pretty old-school; /bin/tcsh as a shell, pine as an email reader, wmaker as a wm, ... But recently, my work gave me a laptop to use as my work machine. We're mandated to use Fedora FC3, so I decided to give all of the fancy stuff a shot - I ended up using firefox, thunderbird, gnome, gaim, and all of the standard stuff. I don't mind using gnome and gaim actually works pretty well, but with a 2Ghz laptop and 1G of main memory, you'd think that thunderbird would be pretty snappy - think again! I got very tired of the "sending ..." message - I always had to minimize my "compose' window because it took a while for it to go away - even when using a SMTP server on localhost. What the hell are they doing that takes so f-ing long? My contacts list became contaminated with tons of people - many of them who were CC'ed on some emails got auto-added to my contacts list and there were many versions of several of the people that I email regularly. It just plain sucked. I guess I'm just used to the speed and simplicity of command-line apps. They work, they're quick-n-dirty and there's no mess and no fuss. I can be much more proficient in pine than I can in thunderbird. You'd think that the people who wrote thunderbird would know the problems with most GUI apps (having to use the mouse for everything) and make pine or mutt keybindings for it (i.e. make it more old-school unix-user friendly).

Needless to say, I gave all of the fancy tools about 2 months and yesterday I went back to pine, fetchmail, procmail, ... Sure, it's a little tougher to configure, but it's just plain, old better. I'm sticking with gaim - the other option is a jabber client and they're about the same with more "noise" and not as stable for the main IM connectors. I've still got the gnome window manager going, but I installed E17-beta (since hearing you guys talk about it for a while) and it's nice too, but too much junk. I'm thinking about going backwards to blackbox or something a little less "special" and a little more responsive.

Just my opinion.

Perhaps a discussion topic.

- Steve

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 10:04 am

I have yet to find a good linux email app. I've tried at least 10 and they all suck in some way or another. It baffles me. I don't like pine, either, though. I've been fored to learn and use it since I'm the "pine guy" at work, but the navigation keys and interface were develloped by a sadist IMO. Give me good old elm or even "mail."

Mortuis · Post by **Mortuis** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 3:10 pm

I can't even use mail apps anymore. I need my inbox with me everywhere, so I've resorted to webmail. I don't even bother archiving my e-mail with a mail app anymore. It's too much bother and I never reference it.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 10:01 am

Snarkout wrote:I have yet to find a good linux email app. I've tried at least 10 and they all suck in some way or another. It baffles me. I don't like pine, either, though. I've been fored to learn and use it since I'm the "pine guy" at work, but the navigation keys and interface were develloped by a sadist IMO. Give me good old elm or even "mail."

I primarily use mutt. It works pretty well. The mutt motto is "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

I agree.

What I like best is it lets me use vim as my editor. Between sendmail, procmail, fetchmail and mutt, my mail is under control.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 2:45 am

I mostly just use Gmail in Firefox, but occasionally, I'll use Evolution as a mail client. I find it to be much faster than Thunderbird. Give it a shot.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/