On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 12:48:03AM -0500, Havoc Pennington scripsit:
> pine was developed for universities, right. Target audience: thousands
> of random students that aren't used to unix or the command line
> logging on to a central UNIX server. It seems like the main point of
> pine was to be less cryptic than elm etc.
> I would be willing to bet that pine's default config wipes the floor
> with mutt's default config in a usability test, though pine has some
> silliness also, mutt has some behaviors that are just plain old
> bizarre. I won't bother to start a thread on exactly which those are
> and why. ;-)
Having supported some of those thousands of students while an email
system using pine was being rolled out, yes, this is true, but the
question of usability tests is one I'm somewhat dubious about.
It's amazing how stuck people could get with pine; I particularly
remember the reaction to the pico menu where it says to do '^X'.
(They would _type_ 'carat, X' and not understand why it was beeping at
them.)
Pine, you gotta know that carat means 'control'; mutt, you have to know
that ? gets you the list of commands. It works out to a remarkably
similar thing.
> You may well be right that most people have moved to GUI stuff these
> days, when I was in school most students still used the UNIX servers,
> but I'm already old enough to be out of touch. ;-)
So far as I know, there exists not a single GUI mail client that allows
one to use a real -- meaning 'user defined' -- editor when composing
one's mail messages.
Am I wrong about this?
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