Re: e-mail application

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

Hullo. I've been lurking for a bit, and intend to go back to it, but
ease of use is something that generates far too much heat and
relatively little light.

>>>>> Jim == Jim Jackson <jj [at] scs.leeds.ac.uk> writes:

Jim> Pine, mail, and loadsa other REAL Mail apps don't use such
Jim> things as Tcl/Tk or Qt or anything else.

`echo $WHATEVER | sendmail $ADDRESS' is vastly underexploited. ;-)

Jim> Ease of use is a personal thing.

Sure. Personally I agree with your tastes; you'd think that everybody
uses email enough to appreciate the advantages of learning a powerful
interface with most operations available within two or keystrokes.
But tastes do differ on that.

Thing is, ease of use is also _multi-dimensional_. Efficiency is
important, and leads to ease of use in one sense (reduces user
fatigue, etc.) But there is also the slope of the learning curve, and
that's more important to sometime users who don't need efficiency in
a given app, but rather need to get it over with fast so they can
click the close button and get back to real work.

Unfortunately, for reasons I don't understand, the two kinds of ease
of use seems to conflict. You'd think you could do both (my mailer,
VM/XEmacs, is a really good try at it; Pine is too, except that I'm
prejudiced against anything that starts right out by opening a menu in
my face, and then takes up good editing real estate with a split
screen), but it's rare.

And there may be other dimensions, too.

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