Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Nov 17, 2011 20:11 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875)
In reply to: Ha-Ha-Only-Serious by CChittleborough
Parent article: Huge pages, slow drives, and long delays

the browser is the only thing that uses large amounts of memory

You obviously don't use Evolution.

Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Nov 17, 2011 20:51 UTC (Thu) by chuckles (guest, #41964) [Link] (9 responses)

You obviously don't use Evolution.

Does anyone? I didn't realize it was still being worked on.

Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Nov 17, 2011 21:10 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (5 responses)

You make me chuckle, chuckles.

I still use it, and I sometimes wish they would stop working on it, as they keep making it harder to use after every update. I guess they have the gnome mind set too.

I never cared much for mutt. I do like alpine, but too many people send me html crap that I need to read, and tbird always screws up patches I try to send.

Evolution seems to work the best with imap and it's trivial to send sane patches.

Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Nov 17, 2011 23:33 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

> I never cared much for mutt.

I didn't at first either, mainly because the bindings were crazy and inconsistent. I've gotten it to be pretty well vim-ish, but it's not a 1:1 translation. It is certainly more consistent though and that makes it much better for me.

> I do like alpine

I couldn't get the hang of alpine. Too much not-mail clutter around.

> but too many people send me html crap that I need to read

For HTML, I have a bindings to toggle plain text or w3m -dump viewing for HTML mails (Ctrl-U and Ctrl-I, respectively). It works fairly well, not perfect, but better than any web interface.

Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Nov 18, 2011 0:40 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (3 responses)

The thing is. I actually like the GUI part of Evolution. mutt just looks damn ugly. I use it to read LKML but that's it. I place reading email up there with web browsing, and I personally think they both do better with a GUI interface than plain text.

I like to have a preview screen. I move mail all the time by dragging a message over to a folder with the mouse. I do wish Evolution had better keyboard short cuts, as I probably could move messages faster with typing. I did with alpine. But mutt still seems hackish to me, and I never got past it. I've been using it for LKML for a few years now, and I still don't care much for it.

Evolution is big and slow, and I need to kill it as often as I do my browsers, but other than that, it works well for me. If it had better key bindings, I would dare call it an awesome application.

Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Nov 18, 2011 7:53 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I agree that the default mutt colorscheme is...less than pleasant. Of course, any UI with many elements tends to do poorly with just 8 colors. I converted the vim colorscheme I use (neverland-darker) over to it[1].

I could see a 'hackish' feeling, but the bindings were the biggest part of that for me. Moving messages is = and then I have tab completion and (session-local) history in the prompt. Tagging files with searches works wonders too to do batch processing of a sort.

I don't imagine we'll convince each other as I find gut feelings are hard to explain and uproot besides and I've been using mutt happily for over a year since moving from KMail.

[1]http://blipper.dev.benboeckel.net/files/mutt.png

Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Nov 24, 2011 20:40 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

I afew months ago I would've said - try KMail. Much faster than Evolution, highly efficient keyboard shortcuts and layout options, nice security integration etc.

Until they came with an Akonadi based KMail2 - now it's as slow, if not slower, than Evolution, and eating lots of RAM. Now I have to wait until they fix it and muddle through in the mean time; or give up and go back to webmail :(

Ha-Ha-Only-Serious

Posted Dec 3, 2011 23:25 UTC (Sat) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

Now I have to wait until they fix it and muddle through in the mean time; or give up and go back to webmail :(

In that case, I'd give RoundCube a try. It has worked perfectly for me by keeping much of the desktop mail client feel. Certainly, that feel sometimes break down, but in general I'm very pleased, especially compared to my old webmail client, Squirrelmail.

SquirrelMail is way more configurable though, if you need that (although RoundCube might be more configurable than I think, currently I'm just running the default Synology DSM version).

Evolution

Posted Nov 17, 2011 21:36 UTC (Thu) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link] (2 responses)

I use Evolution. It has a few features I haven't found in other e-mail clients:

* Ability to specify only a part of the message as "preformatted text", so they don't get word-wrapped. Useful for pasting console output in support messages, for example.
* Nice "bullet list"/"number list" support.
* Pretty good IMAP support.
* Multiple-language spell-checking in a single mail.

It's bloated and slow, but newer versions actually do fix lots of bugs.

Evolution

Posted Nov 17, 2011 23:44 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> Ability to specify only a part of the message as "preformatted text", so they don't get word-wrapped. Useful for pasting console output in support messages, for example.
Do you mean when writing mails or viewing them? Mutt takes whatever $EDITOR gives back, verbatim. For viewing, I have bindings to toggle between 78 width and $COLUMNS-2 (300+ here which is a little much for a default wrap boundary).

> Nice "bullet list"/"number list" support.
I tend to just do ASCII lists in vim myself.

> Pretty good IMAP support.
I use offlineimap here.

> Multiple-language spell-checking in a single mail.
I'm not bilingual (or anything more for that matter), so I've not had to solve this one.

Evolution

Posted Nov 18, 2011 1:59 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

Vim does multilingual spell-checking.

Stress-testers

Posted Nov 18, 2011 12:27 UTC (Fri) by CChittleborough (subscriber, #60775) [Link] (1 responses)

You're right, I don't use Evolution. I use (and highly recommend) fastmail.fm, via their excellent webmail interface. So my mail program is just as memory-hungry as Firefox, because it is Firefox.

Slightly more on topic: Mozilla has been working on reducing memory usage in recent versions of Firefox, with good success AFAICT. So we may need to find another stress-tester for the memory subsystem ... :-)

Stress-testers

Posted Nov 24, 2011 20:42 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Don't worry, Firefox still has no problem eating over 500 mb of ram for just a few web pages :D