🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1518@cbnewsc.ATT.COM> gregg@cbnewsc.ATT.COM (gregg.g.wonderly) writes:
> I had a personal reply from my original article that stated this
>> And MH is huge, chews up disk space and inodes, and is hard to learn and
>> slow to use.

That was me.

The huge issue was covered by Dan.  The distribution is enormous; generally
too big for anyone but a system administrator to handle.  What if some
random user would like to use it, but it's not installed on the system?

You glossed over the "chews up disk space" issue, here.
Remember that every file size is rounded up to the nearest blocksize, which
is usually 1024 bytes.  There are several members of the system staff here
who use MH and store hundreds of messages each, thereby chewing up disk
space (and inodes) in a disastrous fashion.  Sure, they can packf their
folders every once in a while, but there's that added effort again (see
below).

The "slow to use" comment was not meant to refer to the speed of the command
execution, but the effort required to get anything done.  There are two
parts to this.  With any MUA, you have to first customize it, then use it.
In both cases, I claim that MH is slower and more complicated than Mush.

For example, suppose I want to reply to a letter.  When I do so, I want to
include the letter I'm replying to with nice headers around it, and use the
editor of my choice, and add my signature to the end of it if appropriate.

The customization phase with MH seems to involve setting up a good reply
editor.  It seems that I need to write a little shellscript using sed(1) or
awk(1), along with "mhl" and a formfile, which sets up the message with the
included message and my signature, and then calls my favorite editor
($VISUAL).  That is not an easy task for a novice MH user, particularly if
they're a novice UNIX user.  (sed?  awk?  pipes?  $VISUAL?  shellscripts?)

Note that I am only a psuedo-advanced MH user, so there might be easier ways
to do this, but they seem to be either complicated or hard to find.

In Mush, I set a couple of variables in my .mushrc, like autoinclude,
autoedit, autosign, and pre_indent_str.  (Actually, I don't do all these,
things, since I don't always want to include the letter or my signature, or
edit it automatically.  I can choose to do that on the fly, by specifying
options to the "reply" command, like "reply -i -e".)

Note that this is just an example.  I feel it illustrates the point.

In article <WISNER.89Jul3114848@anableps.berkeley.edu> wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) writes:
> Well, I was a mush user until I came across MH..

Well, I was an MH user until I came across Mush.
-- 
Mark Sirota - University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
 Internet: msir@cc.rochester.edu
 Bitnet:   msir_ss@uordbv.bitnet
 UUCP:     {decvax,harvard,ames,rutgers}!rochester!ur-cc!msir