woods@robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods) (12/03/89)
I just compiled elm (as received from Evan via darcy@druid, but with patch #14 installed). I'm a Mush (Mail Users' SHell) user, so the following is a bit biased to say the least! :-) It works. And, with Configure it was potentially easier to install than mush is, though mush is the biggest non-Configure'ed programme I've installed, and it was exceedingly easy to do too, with appropriate comments in the Makefile and config.h, as well as extensive README's. Elm's Configure asks some questions with some rather un-obvious consequences. I'm not real sure why some people like it so much. :-) Its user interface is a bit more consistant than mush's, but.... Mush's user-interface can be easily tailored to do almost anything, and mush has a normal command style interface as well as a window interface for X-View and Sun users to boot! The help stuff is nice, but no better than mush's. The alias scheme sucks. Why can't people leave well enough alone? The elm designers must have thought aliases would be used far more intensely than they generally are. There's no need for odd-ball file formats and weird hash algorithms, and even though the alias command in mush is the most expensive one, it is still managable, and compatible with mailx (or Mail). Mush has the added atvantage of being mostly compatible with mailx and Berkely Mail, but with most of their deficiencies removed. With the flick of a switch (-C on the command line), it goes into curses mode, with a similar look and feel to elm, but still allowing you to return to the normal command mode. Elm is bigger all by itself, (on my 3B2: elm: 141624 + 89564 + 63712 = 294900 mush:193552 + 55548 + 33492 = 282592 and keep in mind elm was linked '-lc_s', and mush wasn't.) and if you count the other associated tools, it is more than twice as big. (Still no match for mh!) I will look at the various utilities to see if they are of any use on their own, though most seem to be all available in mush in one way or another (eg. frm == mush -H). Perhaps fastmail will be useful. Do all those weird headers (Priority, Expires, Action, etc.) conform to rfc822? I don't think so... Anyhow, I was just testing it and figured I'd pick on the person who brought it to my attention in the first place!