On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 06:25:17PM -0600, lee wrote: > > > 1.) It is awkward. > > > > My point above was that it's going to be awkward regardless; you're > > going to have to take some action to manually mark your messages with > > your category. > > Yes, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be an easier way to do > that than there is now.
I'd venture a guess that the overwhelming majority of Mutt users don't find it awkward... I certailnly don't. You have to remember that the goal of Mutt is to provide the user with a great deal of power to process mail in a way that's fast and flexible, in the context of a terminal window. Terminal windows historically have dimensions of roughly 80x25 cells of ASCII text, which doesn't leave you a lot of room for the kinds of things you want. Granted, these days most people are using terminal emulators with adjustable sizes, but lots of people still use 80x25 terminal windows, either because they like to maximize their screen real estate, or because they are actually still using those ancient text-oriented termnals, believe it or not! There are also people who read their mail on mobile devices, with screens even smaller than 80x25. Mutt tries to accomodate everyone... but on such small terminal screens, there's a limit to what you can do with the UI and maintain some degree of usability. Mutt optimizes a lot of things for the way the vast majority of people expect to manage their mail, which is the way I outlined. What you want is something entirely different, and Mutt is not designed to do that; nor am I aware of any mailer which does what you want. You're complaining a lot about the UI being clunky -- I think you want a GUI mail client, for starters... Sylpheed or GMail might be more to your liking. Mutt isn't designed to handle mail the way you want, so short of some of the tricks with threading that have been mentioned here (which seem a lot more clunky to me than what I've discussed, honestly), I don't think you're going to get Mutt to do what you want any time soon. A big part of the problem is that you're apparetnly trying to use Mutt through its file browser interface... this is not how Mutt is intended to be used, and yes, it's clunky: Mutt is not a file manager. It's expected that you'll tell Mutt about the folders you care about. You are trying to use Mutt in a way that does not take advantages of the strengths of it, and highlights the weaknesses. If you're unwilling to change the way you process your mail, I think you will become increasingly dissatisfied with Mutt as your mail client over time. > > You can adress this with the macros I suggested to put you in > > "category" mode vs. "normal" mode. It has the effect of distinguising > > the folders for categories from your regular mail folders. > > Maybe, but to do that, I would have to spend a lot of time to learn > how to create macros and to program some that would do what I > want. I don't think so... I gave you the command you need (mailboxes), you need only look up that in the manual, and then read the secton on macros... I'd bet you could get this working in about 10 minutes. > And I don't want to use two different modes. Well, that I can not help you with. Perhaps the mail thread trick is enough for you. > > > 3.) It's incompatible with the folder hierarchy I have. > > > > Given the above, I don't see how... > > It would create another folder hierarchy within the one I already have > --- or, even more complicated, somewhere else. But it doesn't matter! Because you just tell mutt about them with the mailboxes command, and the location becomes not interesting. The folder browser prevents you with a flat view of all your mailboxes that you've told Mutt about. You keep insisting that Mutt is clunky and won't do what you want it to, but you haven't even tried to use Mutt the way it's intended to be used. What do you expect? > > > If there's another new message that would belong to a category I > > > have, I would have to browse through the folder hierarchy, and I > > > would have to remember for each directory I see in the list if it's > > > a maildir or a directory that contains maildirs. Changing folders in > > > mutt is fumbly (c TAB TAB enter CTRL-g CTRL-g c TAB TAB down down > > > ... enter ?? q ??? CTRL-g ... Hmm.? c ...). > > > > This is simply false. Press 'c' to change folders. Now press '?' to > > bring up the list of mailboxes you've told Mutt to watch with the > > mailboxes configuration keyword. They're all there. Now type the > > number of the folder you want to enter, or use your keyboard's > > directional keys to select it if you prefer. It's that easy. > > It shows all the folders --- pressing y shows only the ones in the > config. So put your folders in your config. This is the way Mutt is intended to be used. You can even do it programatically, by, for example, writing a script to identify maildirs in a particular directory tree, and output mailboxes commands for each one it finds. Moreover, if you stop mixing directories and maildirs, you could even use the file browser... though again, that's not how Mutt is intended to be used, so you're giving up a lot of the power of Mutt if you use it that way. > Why doesn't mutt show directories as directories, maildirs as maildirs > and maildirs with submaildirs as such in the list so that you can tell > from the list which is which, without having to switch into a > directory first? Because a maildir IS a directory, and it's not possible to reliably determine the difference. You can make an assumption that if a directory has cur/ new/ tmp/ in it, it's a maildir, but that may not be the case. And a directory might have some of those, but not all of them, and be an actual maildir. Or it might not be. And moreover, it's because Mutt expects you to tell it about the mail folders you care about. In so doing, it prevents a lot of tedious guesswork that mutt could get wrong, in determining what your mail folders are. > And is it possible to get a recursive list so that I could switch to > a subdirectory directly instead of having to go from one directory > to another? If you tell mutt about your folders, this is unnecessary. > To prevent piling up empty maildirs, I think three times before > creating a new one and preferably don't, and when one is empty, I'm > forced to open a shell and to delete it right away because if I > don't, I either forget which one to delete or would have to write it > down. I only did that when I was cleaning up my mails, and that > means that when I need to delete an empty maildir, I'm forced to > interrupt what I'm doing and to change to another program to find > and delete the maildir. On top of that, since maildirs have > subdirectories, you either delete four directories or use rm -rf. Of > course, rm -rf is something you have to be really careful with ... How could managing your mail this way possibly be efficient or productive? You're creating folders on the fly and deleting them when they're empty. > It's awkward. Just keep the number of maildirs as low as possible. Yeah, do that. Create folders with broad characterizations, and keep them fixed; don't create new ones, and don't delete them. It won't be a problem to find mails in such folders if you know what you're looking for; Mutt has very powerful searching facilities. > > But as we've discussed in a different thread, it's not safe for > > Mutt to remove maildirs -- the implementation is a bit difficult > > and can't be made safe in all cases. > > Yeah, I know --- but what's the difference between me deleting a > maildir using a shell and me deleting a maildir using mutt in regard > to safety? The difference is that I use rm -rf, which isn't save at > all, while mutt could do it safely and even warn me if there are still > mails in the maildir. You're not getting it... Mutt CAN NOT do this safely. Under certain circumstances it can be safe, but it can not be reliably safe. The maildir mail format was simply not designed for this. > There's nothing against mutt giving you a warning "hey, if you delete > a maildir, that could be unsafe ... Show this warning again or not? > ..." Yes, there is... both Mutt and Maildir were designed with the assumption that a user's mail folders would remain relatively static; you filter mail into folders with somewhat broad categories, and remove them only rarely: Specifically, you remove them when you no longer want to use them... which means that (if you're using maildir the way it's intended to be used) you're going to turn off mail delivery to that folder, remove it from your mail configuration, and THEN you can safely delete it. Manually. That's what Maildir was designed for. Mutt expects the same. So, adding a feature to Mutt which is unsafe and contrary to the design of the mechanisms it uses is quite simply bad application design. Most of your issues with Mutt boil down to you not using Mutt and maildirs as they were intended to be used. There's nothing to force you to do that, but if you want to use them in ways they were not designed to be used, you will become frustrated with them, as indeed you have... But the bad news is that most people process mail the way Mutt was designed to, so you'll have trouble finding what you want. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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