How can this email client with such a lousy name be such a great application?

[rosslaird]

OK, I'm officially converted away from the unreliable, slow, and buggy worlds of kmail/evolution/thunderbird to the wonderful, clear, sparse religion of mutt.

It sounds crazy, or that I'm going backwards, to choose a command-line application over the GUI mail programs, since the gui is so clearly where it's at and where everything is going (at least, from the end user's point of view).

But mutt is astonishing: fast, immensely configurable, stable, powerful. Using vim as my email editor is fantastic. Using the search and filtering options is great. I can change the look and feel at will, can add macros and keystrokes for whatever I want (external address book access is the only thing I have macro-ized so far, and it works perfectly). There are a gazillion tips and how-to's on the web for mutt, and the user community seems very robust.

I continue to move further from the gui. Now, all my text editing is done in vim, my emailing is done in mutt, and my to-do list is on the command line. The only thing I use the gui for at the moment is web browsing, which I think is still best done from the desktop. And the gui renders fonts much better than the console, so I just keep a terminal open on an otherwise empty desktop and go from there.

To repeat: I am astonished by mutt's power as an email application. It simply beats the pants off anything else (OK, pine is pretty good too).

Ross

[TravisNewman]

the wonders of mutt. You've come over to the light side

Seriously, mutt is fantabulous. You should try out irssi for IRC, considering you're using vim for editing text files instead of gedit, etc. You'll find the simplicity and power of CLI based programs incredible once you get used to them.

You're right though, browsing with the command line is a beast, and not very fun.

[rosslaird]

You'll find the simplicity and power of CLI based programs incredible once you get used to them.

I've been using vim for about six months and am a serious convert. I'm a professional writer, and vim makes ever other word processor seem like a tinker toy.

Mutt is adding a little more pleasure to my cli experience...