4 ms·

On the topic of console email clients, why does Mutt receive so much love and Alpine doesn't? I used Pine for many years in college and I really liked its menu

On the topic of console email clients, why does Mutt receive so much love and Alpine doesn't? I used Pine for many years in college and I really liked its menu interface and its ability to read news. I used Mutt some years ago and found it too complex for the task. Maybe it's becaused I was used to Pine. Has somebody used both recently and can elaborate a bit? Thanks!

exDM69 10y ago
May be due to Mutt's more Vi-like user interface. Vimmers use Mutt and Emacs guys use emacs-based mail user agents. There aren't too many people preferring terminal mail apps left for Alpine.
- bshimmin 10y ago
  Just to be contrary, I happily used emacs and Mutt together for about a decade. (I wanted to start using Mutt again earlier this year, but so far the labour of love involved in cobbling a good .muttrc together - without just copying bits and pieces from other people's - has proved too much like hard work, and I have enough of that as it is.)
- Steltek 10y ago
  I'm a brain damaged user. I switched from Vim to Emacs a few years ago but kept Mutt. But I also tend to (ab)use Emacs like it's Vim. No emacsclient but I still pop in and out of it quickly. .emacs has a lot of lazy loading to keep startup snappy.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  There are actually no emacs mail clients that I could get to work :-(. So I used mutt for a while. Nowadays, I answer all my email on my phone, when I can bother to sort through the deluge of spam at all.
dredmorbius 10y ago
I haven't used Alpine, but did use Pine for a while (also elm, mail, whatever the standard VMS client was, and some others). I quit using Pine for the usual reason: it was nonfree and not bundled. My first alternative was Netscape Mail (actually fairly decent, threaded, which helped). Then got into mutt. Mutt is just ... more power-user than Pine, I guess. The ability to tag and pipe messages or headers into shell tools is hugely useful. Wnat to get a summary of messages by sender, subject, or parse bodies on the fly to give some simple stats or graphics? That's doable as a shell one-liner from mutt. (MH is another option and probably even more amenable to scripting tricks -- see Larry Peeks book on the topic.)

exDM69 10y ago

May be due to Mutt's more Vi-like user interface. Vimmers use Mutt and Emacs guys use emacs-based mail user agents. There aren't too many people preferring terminal mail apps left for Alpine.

bshimmin 10y ago
Just to be contrary, I happily used emacs and Mutt together for about a decade. (I wanted to start using Mutt again earlier this year, but so far the labour of love involved in cobbling a good .muttrc together - without just copying bits and pieces from other people's - has proved too much like hard work, and I have enough of that as it is.)
Steltek 10y ago
I'm a brain damaged user. I switched from Vim to Emacs a few years ago but kept Mutt. But I also tend to (ab)use Emacs like it's Vim. No emacsclient but I still pop in and out of it quickly. .emacs has a lot of lazy loading to keep startup snappy.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
There are actually no emacs mail clients that I could get to work :-(. So I used mutt for a while. Nowadays, I answer all my email on my phone, when I can bother to sort through the deluge of spam at all.

dredmorbius 10y ago

I haven't used Alpine, but did use Pine for a while (also elm, mail, whatever the standard VMS client was, and some others). I quit using Pine for the usual reason: it was nonfree and not bundled. My first alternative was Netscape Mail (actually fairly decent, threaded, which helped). Then got into mutt. Mutt is just ... more power-user than Pine, I guess. The ability to tag and pipe messages or headers into shell tools is hugely useful. Wnat to get a summary of messages by sender, subject, or parse bodies on the fly to give some simple stats or graphics? That's doable as a shell one-liner from mutt. (MH is another option and probably even more amenable to scripting tricks -- see Larry Peeks book on the topic.)