From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jul 28 17:12:52 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (zoom0-035.telepath.com [216.14.0.35]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 7A67237BB28 for ; Fri, 28 Jul 2000 17:12:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 11243 invoked by uid 100); 29 Jul 2000 00:12:29 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14722.8557.698905.41406@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 19:12:29 -0500 (CDT) To: Sam Carleton Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: the best MUA In-Reply-To: <39821F2E.3822D0AE@miltonstreet.com> References: <14721.62042.360841.509529@guru.mired.org> <39821F2E.3822D0AE@miltonstreet.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Sam Carleton writes: > > redirection facilities, and fetchmail.But I wouldn't advice anyone to > > look at the emacs mail readers unless they were already using emacs. > Amen to that. I have the O'Reilly book on emacs, read it a few times, but > it never sat right with me:) I understand that it is a very powerful > editor, but I finally gave in, and bought the vi book. I am now an vi > user:) Basically, vi vs. emacs is two different philosophies. Emacs is "modeless", in the sense that it doesn't have an "insert" mode. Unless you're in the middle of a command, printing characters get inserted into the buffer. Vi has distinct "edit" and "insert" modes. You either hate having to switch modes, or you hate the long commands forced on you by being modeless. The real advantage of the emacs mail readers is that you're *in emacs*, so you always have an editor you know handy. FWIW, I tend to use ex or vi as root for tweaking config files and the like. If I could get the emacs client/server stuff to deal with permissions properly, I might stop that. > I am going to try mutt, and I might even try emacs:) You might want to give mh a look. Instead of using a single file for a mailbox, it uses directories with each message in a file. The upside of this is that you can use standard unix commands on a per-message basis. The downside is that there's a *lot* more I/O involved in loading a folder into a UMA. The standard mh interface is a set of Unix commands that manipulate folders & messages in that format, but there are a number of wrappers for them, including two Emacs modes, a visual (like elm/pine/mutt/etc) mode, and an X interface (xmh).