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

[Jordan Bettis]

Ian Bicking said:
> My main applications now are: XEmacs (happily),

EEE GAD! UNHOLY! :P

> rxvt (sufficient),

You might want to try aterm, it's both light weight and pretty (very
powerful pseudo-transparency). Of course, if you're using ion, you're
probably not going for looks.

> 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.

Well, I've been using mutt for pretty much as long as I've used Debian
(probably about three years now). It's nice enough, but lately I've
been thinking about switching to gnus. I don't know much about its mail
reading capabilities (save that they're extensive), but I use it for
news and am quite happy with it in that regard.

Of course, it'll have all of the guisms that Emacs has (I think JWZ's
evil creation might even have a few more than the real Emacs), and I
know it has at least all of the message viewing and editing functions
that mutt has, plus stuff that I don't know how to use yet like
scoring.

I have no idea how its IMAP performance is, its NNTP is slow because
it spools the entire group every time you open it, it does no header
caching (except of read messages). That was a problem back in the day
when I tried to use it over my dialup line to my ISPs news server,
not so much now that I have inn running on the same box. Caching
headers is a pain anyway, you end up having headers in your list of
news that has expired on the server, that was always a problem for me
with news agents that did that.

> (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)

Heh, like what? Gnome-terminal can do tabbing, which is sorta cool, but
I don't use it except on my school's sun systems because I don't like
my terminal to be bigger than my web browser. I can't really think of
any other cool features for a xterm to do. Maby let the mouse move the
curser around if it's in non-baked mode or something.

-- 
Jordan Bettis <http://www.hafd.org/~jordanb>
This message has been written using my webmail system.