Mutt has been around forever as an email client, like the much vaunted Pine-still available, by the way-and NeoMutt is nothing more than Mutt pre-built with several of the most common Mutt patches. I wanted better, and I finally did something about it: I went to Mutt. The greatest sin, though, is that the searching capabilities are almost universally horrid, ineffectual, and slow. The layouts of most, while familiar, are only acceptable because we have all become used to them, not because they are useful. The applications seem to be massively bloated, taking much more memory and processing power than their functions would suggest. One area where I find, almost without exception, the GUI completely horrific and lacking is in today’s email clients. ![]() That said, I do manage to claw my way back into the command-line world where I can, a piece at a time, and the small victories keep me satiated, for the most part. Of course, if you’re not accustomed to the command line, or you’re not a luddite, you may scoff at the idea of using an archaic interface method, but I do find that most power users I know-and this is purely anecdotal-prefer a text interface as well: the Unix shell, Windows PowerShell, Cisco IOS, whatever. I do have valid reasons, in my own mind at least, for preferring a text-based interface: I can be more proficient when I do not have to remember where all the little pictures and menus are, and what manner of clickety-clicking I need to perform in order to accomplish regular, mundane, should-be-easy tasks my brain is hardwired to remember words more than pictures, and as a general rule the command line offers more power and flexibility than does the GUI. The challenge in today’s world is that many operating systems, and an increasing number of network, storage, and other enterprise-level devices, all make it at difficult to use the command line. By and large, however, in any environment I can think of, I prefer a command line interface. ![]() There have been the occasional graphics dalliances: the Amiga, NeXTSTEP, the Enlightenment window manager, some aspects of the current OS X GUI. ![]() It probably stems from how long I have been using computers, and what my first computer interfaces looked like, but I have been enamored of command line interfaces since, well, forever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |