Sven Guckes wrote: > > mutt does not strive to be popular with everyone. after all, all > those bad mailers were written to *fit* some people - and they > certainly do! so dont take them away from those - they deserve it!
i think this statement is a bit elitist.... simply because a tool is powerful doesn't mean that it can't also be fairly easy to use. it can be overwhelming to be faced with all that power at once; however that doesn't mean that the tool isn't still worth using. for instance, mutt might be far superior to pine, but there are still a lot of pine users out there, simply because pine is much easier to use initially. i was thinking about this in the car tonight, and i realized that (AFAIK) there isn't a simple interactive command line program to help new users adjust to / configure mutt. such a program could easily be written as a shell script or a perl script... and could be included in the mutt distribution, or in the contrib/ directory. basically, the tool would be oriented towards helping people set suitable defaults, and creating a decent .muttrc. while the mutt defaults are (in general) very sensibly chosen, it's often hard for new users to figure out what parameter they must change to have the desired effect. common stuff like "set move=no", "set mbox_type=Maildir", etc. could be included here, with a brief explanation of the choices. it could also ask if the user is used to other programs (ie pine) and offer to make the keybindings more familiar. it might also look at environment variables and the answers to previous questions in order to give sensible default choices (ie if $MAIL is set to /var/mail/william, that's probably a good choice for 'mbox'; if ~~/mail exists but ~/Mail doesn't, setting folder to ~/mail is probably a good idea; if $EDITOR or $VISUAL is set to nano, then perhaps 'nano -t' would be the default selection offered for 'editor'). lastly, the program could explain a few things (commonly asked questions, for example) so that they're less likely to be asked on the list. if the program came out well enough, perhaps mutt could even ask if you want to run it if ~/.muttrc or ~/.mutt/muttrc don't exist. in any event, i'd be happy to help if anyone wants to work on this (if it's in perl, my ability to help will be limited). -- Will Yardley william @ newdream . net
