[CLUE-Tech] my beloved pine and pico

[Randy Arabie]

Quoting Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier <jzb at dissociatedpress.net>:

> On Thu, 05 Feb 2004 12:11:55 -0700
> Mike Staver <staver at fimble.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to use Fedora Core 1 today... and I'm very disappointed to 
> > see that Pine was dropped from the release due to some kind of license 
> > dispute. (I swear, if all the liceneses would just get along, linux 
> > would be sooo much better!) Anyhoo, I now would like to find a 
> > replacement for both command line email and my text editor.  Pico was 
> > great - I learned it 11 years ago on Solaris, and I never looked back. 
> > I know of emacs and vi, but vi seems hard to use for me.  Without 
> > starting a flame war, can someone please let me know which email client 
> > and text editors you think are the best... and most likely to not get 
> > dropped from a future Red Hat / Fedora release?  Thanks.
> 
> I belive the MUA of choice for RH/Fedora would be Mutt, if you're
> looking for a text-mode client. Mutt can be configured to act more or
> less like Pine in conjunction with the Nano editor, which is a GNU
> replacement for Pico. It's not a perfect replacement, but it will do in
> a pinch, and you might find that you like Mutt a bit more when you
> explore all the other stuff it can do. 
> 
> There's no "license dispute" really -- Pine has always had a rather
> restrictive license. It allows redistribution, but if I recall
> correctly, you cannot redistribute Pine with any modifications in source
> or binary form -- which usually means that it is necessary to distribute
> Pine as-is, or to distribute it in source code form and require the user
> to compile it with patches to get it to work correctly. I think Debian
> distributes pine in source-code only with patches that have to be
> applied after the fact for it to work on Debian -- a few years ago I was
> using a Debian system and wanted to use Pine, which required quite a few
> gyrations to get it set up. 

I believe Zonker's correct there.  I quit using Pine when I switched to Debian.
 I switched to Mutt, and was really pleased.  After a few weeks, I wished I had
switched to Mutt sooner.

I highly recommend that you try Mutt.  And, if you note from the headers of my
message that I'm not using Mutt, its because I use Horde.  I use Horde because I
frequently access my email from Windoze machines, and using a browser based
client was the easiest way to manage my email.  For me, the Mutt/vi combo is my
favorite.  But, as others have said, Mutt will work well with other text
editors, too.
-- 
Allons Rouler!

Randy
http://www.arabie.org/