20190201-mutt.txt
Recently I've started getting into mutt. This might be pretty odd as
an SDF member, but I did not use or like mutt on SDF. It doesn't help
that it's hardly intuitive at all and setup is a pain for newbies like
me. I've set it up on my local machine with my college email and my
Gmail account successfully today because of some guides missing very
important lines (plural) from their muttrc. "man mutt" and the
official guide while verbose, suffer from what I call
"Wiki-splaining"-- taking a simple concept and going balls deep into
the documentation so only someone who was already well-read on the
subject would know what they're talking about. Plus Wikipedia has a
tendency to get details wrong and very biased. This is why I prefer
ED, because they're at least up front with the inaccuracies and
sarcasm. While it's great to have a detailed guide once you've set
mutt up, it's just plain overwhelming for newbies.
I had to look at 3 different pages/guides just to send mail from my
CLI. That's a pain. "User error," I know, but this is more like
defying the name and logic of "suck less." Yeah, and I have separate
rc files for each account (thankfully only 2) because I have no
interest at the moment of dealing with Mutt's complicated hooks and
half-baked guides.
What I really love is my increasing amount of independence from a GUI.
With framebuffer, I can view images and even videos from the CLI. It
involves suspending tmux, but that's fine. The only issue is with the
VLC framebuffer codec (which I believe is no longer developed :-( ),
it stretches the video to fill the screen. This is fine for me for
16x9 videos, as that's the resolution of my monitor(s). But with
thinner videos, especially portrait 16x9 or thinner, the
stretch-to-fill is a dealbreaker and I go into X anyway. Ostensibly
the GUI is still superior for images and videos (go figure), but the
ability to play videos without a GUI is still pretty cool.
