[UFO Chicago] On Ion and Mail clients...

[Ian Bicking]

I've just switched over to the Ion Window Manager 
<http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/> , and I am very happy.  I was using 
Gnome before, and I realized I just wasn't getting a lot out of it.  Ion has 
some definite problems (mostly with transient windows), but the way it 
manages windows is otherwise totally superior.  For those who aren't familiar 
with it, Ion splits the screen into frames, and applications fit in a single 
frame.  So there's no overlapping windows -- either a window takes up an 
entire frame, or its hidden.  You can have multiple windows in a frame, and 
they act like tabs.  People were talking about PWM at one meeting, which has 
tabs on windows, and I think the two window managers are actually related.  
Ion takes the whole idea further.

But, as long as I'm doing this, I figured I might as well rethink other 
things in my computer usage.  My main applications now are: XEmacs (happily), 
rxvt (sufficient), Galeon (happy -- I tried Phoenix and liked it, but I still 
prefer Galeon), and Evolution.  Leaving out command-line applications, that's 
95% of my application usage (well, probably more). 

But I'm not feeling so great about Evolution -- it's perfectly fine, but it 
feels heavy and everything else I'm using is relatively light.  More 
importantly, I'm using the mouse less, and I want a client that works with 
that.  I've finally committed to IMAP and procmail, so I'm hoping I can tour 
about IMAP enabled mail clients without commitment.

I looked at Sylpheed, which is a decent mail client.  But I'm unhappy with 
its IMAP -- it's slow, and I don't think it's doing the necessary caching to 
get reasonable performance.  I'm typing this in KMail, but I'm unexcited 
about it.  I used to use Mutt, and I'm open to going back, but I kind of like 
some GUI features in a mail client.  I like having multiple windows open, and 
sometimes I like to see HTML mail (usually not, but every so often)... it's 
too bad text clients are so X-unaware (it's not like X programs *have* to be 
significantly graphical).  I love the lack of keyboard focus that text 
clients have -- keyboard focus is a crappy idea in the first place, and is 
implemented exceptionally crappily in Gnome applications.

Does someone know of a mail program that I should be using?  I'm very open to 
novel interfaces.

(Oh... and does a novel terminal emulator even exist?  I'm not sure what it 
would mean, but considering how much time some people spend in these, I feel 
there's room for doing something cooler than some stupid transparent 
background)

  Ian