elm (was Re: [tech] Sane mail)

Nick Bannon nick at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Mon Nov 4 15:36:28 WST 2002


On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 05:14:24PM +0800, John West McKenna wrote:
> Give me something that looks and feels identical to elm (and requires no
> effort from me to set up) and I'll happily convert.  elm is programmed
> into my fingers, like vi.  Learning something else would require
> chopping my fingers off.

elm isn't dead, it's just resting.

I don't really feel like MUA advocacy right now, but I was curious
about the status of elm and here's the results.

elm 2.4 was released in 1992, and that was that for a long time.
Various people made patches for it, but they never seemed to go
anywhere, while the fabled elm 2.5 just took longer and longer to
appear. In particular, a guy called Michael Elkins put a lot of effort
into patching elm, fixing bugs and adding features, producing ELM-ME+.
Eventually he bit the bullet and wrote a new mailreader from scratch -
mutt.

elm 2.5 was eventually released in 1999, but no-one uses it. 

elm-2.4-me+ has had development by various people. On closer inspection,
it seems that it even supports POP and IMAP now, but the version on
mermaid and morwong (from 1999) does not. It did not make it into the
Debian woody release because no-one cared enough about it to fix its
bugs - a couple of people piped up in July to adopt it, but that hasn't
actually happened yet (but the bugs were fixed by someone else).

There are perfectly good reasons why someone might want to use a
different MUA like pine/sylpheed/emacs/evolution/... , but mutt is a
better elm than elm. It feels like elm, except the help menu is only
one line by default (use ? for a full list of commands) and it doesn't
have a built-in aliases editor (convert with elmalias, reread a file of
configuration commands with "source ~/.mail_aliases" or similar) .

Homepage, FAQ: http://www.mutt.org/
Comparison: http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/mutt/elm.vs.mutt.html

Mutt still sucks, of course.

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."
  - Michael Elkins, circa 1995

Nick.

-- 
     Nick Bannon      | "I made this letter longer than usual because
  nick-sig at rcpt.to    | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal
http://linux.conf.au/ |  Australian Linux Technical Conference, 2003


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