Re: gnus and pine

[harven <harven@free.fr>]

Xavier Maillard <xma@gnu.org> writes:

> harven <harven@free.fr> writes:
>
>> I recently switched from Pine to Gnus as a mail reader.
>> I wrote a quick tutorial on the emacs wiki to make Gnus behave
>> a little more like Pine :
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs-en/GnusAndPine
>> Any comments are welcome. 
>
> I am wondering why you made the switch. 

I have used Pine for some years now, and it was nice, albeit for the
fact that Pine has a built-in editor which is pretty limited when it
comes to localisation, formatting, completion and else. So I began to
use emacs as an external editor. After a while, it felt a bit strange
to spawn big emacs from little pine, when often there was already some
emacs instance hanging around. So I started looking for another way to
check my mail. Gnus is pine-compatible, that is, it can read and write
in the pine mailbox, and it is provided with emacs, so I gave it a try.

> Also could you describe
> Pine onto your emacwiki page and what differs with Gnus (AFYK).
>
> Xavier

The emacs wiki is not the best place to talk about pine. See the pine
(or alpine) webpage for more information about it. In short, Pine is a
unix text-only keyboard-driven mail client, that runs from the command
line, and is targeted at inexperienced users. This may appear a bit
contradictory at first, but really you can set it up and be proficient
with it in less than a minute. Have a try. In some sense, the opposite
of Gnus.

     Pine                       Gnus
     fast                       extensible
     ease-of-use                hard to configure
     primarily a mail reader    primarily a news reader
     C                          Lisp
     from the terminal          from within emacs
     a single mailbox format    seven mailbox formats
     help onscreen              500+ pages manual
     4 millions users           dedicated fan base (?)
     for the mass               for the elisp expert

There is nothing fancy with the code I wrote on the wiki. Main points
* one letter shortcuts for common task in the summary buffer, same as pine
  s save  d delete  f forward  r reply ... 
* a few different marks.  D deleted  X expunge
* expiry 0
* a better "search in articles" command
* highlighting of the current line in the summary buffer
* confirmation when sending email, check for forgotten attachments
It has probably no interest for a seasoned Gnus user. But it may help
a Pine user which wants a better integration with emacs.