Re: [Nmh-workers] Front-end census

[Ken Hornstein]

>1) xmh (obsolete, I assume)

I would be shocked if people still use xmh; wasn't it written with
Athena Widgets?  Eww.

>2) MH-E

There is a relatively active MH-E community; I'm a vi user myself, so I
never tried it.  From what I can tell they've extended it to make up for
the deficiencies in MH; I can kind of understand that, since there was a
period in the 90s when MH development essentially stopped (a long and
tortuous period).

>3) exmh

So, this is the one I use.  Sadly, I kind of wish development had progressed
on this a bit more.  It's mostly functional, but not perfect.  Brent Welch
doesn't work on it anymore; I believe Valdis still has commits privs on it,
but a new release hasn't appeared in a while (changes still get committed
to the tree, though).  It's also written in Tcl, which seems to have fallen
out of favor but still is being developed.  I still hold a soft spot in
my heart for Tcl, so maybe I'm biased.

>4) MH-V

Written by Steve Rader after he got tired of the crap from the Claws Mail
people.  Written in Perl.  I did try it out, but I think Steve used an
old version of nmh, because it gave me some errors when I ran it (but it
had basic functionality).  I believe there are users of it, but I don't
know how many.

>Could you please give a brief assesment of each, based on your experience?
>Which one would be the best bet for a newbie?

I'm not sure I am the best person to answer you, but ones that are
probably the most complete out of those are MH-E and exmh.  I have no idea
if anyone has updated xmh to be compatible with nmh, and I don't even know
if it supports MIME (I see it still ships with X11, but I can't believe
anyone has tested it recently).

I will note that AFAIK the only front-end that works with GNU Mailutils
is MH-E.  I do not believe any of the other front-ends have been tested
with GNU Mailutils, but I could be wrong.

--Ken