Subject: UI of Pine on X-Windows vs. MS-Windows?

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 13:43:07 -0500 (EST)

How does the user interface of PC-Pine compare to Pine in X-Windows
(or another windowing environment on Unix). Does the Unix version have
drop-down menus, pop-up menus, etc.? Is it essentially the same UI as
PC-Pine.

Thanks for any info,
Nancy

PS - One of these days, I'll set up a Linux machine here so I can
figure out this stuff myself.

-- 
©Nancy McGough          http://www.ii.com          Infinite Ink
--= Sent via PINE: Power Internet News & Email for Win/Unix =--

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 11:21:15 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

Nancy,
There is no X-windows version of Pine at this time.
However, Unix Pine can run in an "xterminal" window on systems with X, and 
can then utilize a mouse for clicking on things (if that feature is
enabled), but in all other respects, it looks like Unix Pine, not PC-Pine.

-teg

---

From: Daniel Sands <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 12:22:11 -0700

There is no X-Windows pine IIRC.  UNIX pine is text only.  Probably because
the basic X toolkit is rather clumsy, and Motif is not included with every
UNIX clone out there.

Maybe if Lesstif becomes viable, the Pine people will create a GUI for it.

---

From: Nancy this-address-is-valid McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 14:32:42 -0500 (EST)

> enabled), but in all other respects, it looks like Unix Pine, not PC-Pine.

Thanks for the info. Are there plans to do a GUI Unix Pine? If so,
where on the priority list is it? I.e., is it possibile it would
happen within a year?

On the subject of priority list: Do you think that the pipe command
will work in PC-Pine within a year? 

Thanks,
Nancy

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 12:10:48 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

We used to make predictions of the future, but gave it up for lent.

-teg

---

From: Michael Talbot-Wilson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 07:19:02 +1030 (CST)

> Maybe if Lesstif becomes viable, the Pine people will create a GUI for it.

But there are, of course, other Unix mail clients for X.

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 17:20:47 -0500 (EST)

> But there are, of course, other Unix mail clients for X.

Yes, but are any of them as feature-rich and powerful as Pine?

---

From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Feb 1999 08:44:43 +0100

> Yes, but are any of them as feature-rich and powerful as Pine?

You've got to be joking. }:-> a) People who want a GUI usually don't want
"feature-rich". b) Pine isn't exactly "powerful". So there. And now for
MUAs:

* Balsa (from the Gnome project <http://www.gnome.org/> looks very promising
  and is being very actively developed. Gnome's editor is very, very good
  BTW (which really, really cannot be said of pico. YMMV).
* XFmail is very much like Pegasus in that it includes filters, PGP and
  the like. It also supports IMAP. IIRC, there are some licencing quirks,
  though.
* Basically the same applies to KMail <http://www.kde.org/> (except IMAP
  IIRC) plus it comes with KDE, so the look and feel of it are far less
  challenging than pine's (for someone looking for a drool-proof MUA).

Now, none of these programs support news (but realistically, pine doesn't
really do that, either), but they are a lot "easier" to use. In the
beginning. Until you find out that mice suck and that you're 10 times
faster using a keyboard.

What else? Ah, yes... Gnus. Ummmm... Well... Yeah. Gnus rocks. If you
want "powerful" and "feature-rich", you want Gnus. OTOH, it runs under
XEmacs, so it's a giant memory hog, slow as hell, a beast to set up and
it probably doesn't look sexy to the uninitiated. But it does make up for
that with a vast variety of features I couldn't live without (which is
why I quit using pine and never really used mutt except at work where I
only have MIX which doen't work will with XEmacs). Basically, though, it
shares pine's great advantage of being OS independent.[1] See the glorious
details at <http://socha.net/Gnus/>. Be sure to bring a T1, though, the
graphics are rediculously huge :-/

Basically, I don't miss pine's GUI under Linux. pine doesn't offer any
real support for a GUI, anyway (like inline MIME) so why bother? There are
enough bloated MUAs out there - pine and mutt are very good programs,
ideal for a quick mail.

Footnotes: 
[1]  Did I just say OS? Sorry. Make that: it runs under Windos, too.

-- 
Robin S. Socha

---

From: Michael Talbot-Wilson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 21:31:17 +1030 (CST)

> Yes, but are any of them as feature-rich and powerful as Pine?

Nancy, could you give a list of the features and a description of
the power of Pine in your opinon?  You are better able than many of
us to do so, and without a checklist your question is unanswerable. 

--Mike

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 13:20:31 -0500 (EST)

On 23 Feb 1999, Michael Talbot-Wilson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> the power of Pine in your opinon?  

I have some listed at:

 http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/

After reading what I've got listed at the above URL, I think the best
way to get a sense of the power and flexibility of Pine is to go to
the Main>Setup>Config screen (especially in v4.10) and read the help
on each of the features and variables listed there. If you have
suggestions for Pine "key features" that I should add to my list,
please let me know.

And if there are key features that you think Pine is lacking, please
let me know those too. To me, a key feature that Pine doesn't have is
that it doesn't do true threading and it can't collapse/expand
threads. I have lots of minor wishes, like the one I posted yesterday
about being able to easily forward a message as an attachment (i.e.,
without first saving/exporting it). But I'm confident (or at least
hopeful) that the Pine developers will eventually get that kind of
feature in there.

If I knew I'd never have to do mail/news in a character (rather than
graphical) environment again, I'd seriously consider changing to
another feature-rich, customizable, standards-based (IMAP, MIME, LDAP,
etc.), open source mailer/newsreader that took advantage of the
graphical abilities of the system but without slowing me down.
Unfortunately, for the near future, I'll probably still be doing a lot
of telnetting to Unix boxes and so I'm sticking with Pine, which works
in both character and graphical environments.

I think the main reason that I'm so enthusiastic about Pine is that
I'm able to get all the Unix-like power and flexibility on MS Windows.
The day that Adobe ships a Linux version of FrameMaker, I think I'll
never have to use MS Windows again and the world of powerful
customizable mailers and newsreaders will really open up for me. And
I'll still probably think of Pine as being a serious contender
(assuming it keeps evolving).

---

From: Topher <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 13:39:28 -0500

Earlier I mentioned a problem with roles, but I've figured it out and
thought I'd let folks know since no-one answered.

I was putting the search string in more than one place in the role
(putting topher in both the to: field and the cc: field) thinking it would
look for either-or.  It wasn't it was requiring that *both* be there, and
therefore never working.

So what I did is make one role that looked in the to: field and did some
actions, and then one that looked in the cc: field and told it to use the
actions from the first one and it works fine.

For the developers, it would be nice if the search strings were either-or,
rather than requiring both, so that we could have one role that searched
the entire header for a certain string.

Topher
Tech Support
[email-masked]
Gospel Communications Network

---

From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Feb 1999 21:09:09 +0100

* Nancy McGough <[email-masked]> writes:
> On 23 Feb 1999, Michael Talbot-Wilson started questing for power:

>> Nancy, could you give a list of the features and a description of the
>> power of Pine in your opinon?

> I have some listed at: <http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/> If
> you have suggestions for Pine "key features" that I should add to my
> list, please let me know.

Timothy will probably kill me for Yet Another Offtopic Mail, but, hey!, we
used to do this stuff in the Ole Days, too, so here goes...

			 --==| Pine vs. Gnus |==--

* use its simple clean interface to quickly process lots of messages using
  efficient keystroke commands.

Context sensitive keystrokes and mouse menues depending on which buffer
you're in (group, summary, article...) 

= Point Gnus

* use standard windows features like clicking, double-clicking,
  drop-down menus, pop-up menus, and dialog boxes in the graphical
  versions of Pine

Consistent interface under all OSes.

= Point Gnus

* access different mailbox formats, including mbox ("Berkeley mail" format),
  Tenex, MTX, MH, MMDF, Carmel, and Netnews formats

All those and more. Also, support for SOUP, virtual and kibozed groups
(mixing mail and news).

= Point Gnus

* store your folders and address books on servers and seamlessly access them
  from any of your machines without worrying about your systems getting out
  of sync (this is one of the beauties of IMAP)

IMAP support in Pine is second to none. Gnus does have IMAP support, but
it's still under development.

= Point Pine

* easily launch a URL that's in a message in your favorite browser

Yup, but different browsers are just one keystroke away. Also, Emacs sports 
a built-in browser (W3).

= Point Gnus

* use the same user interface for news and mail, and you can
  simultaneously mail and post a message

News support in pine *sucks*. AFAICS, it doesn't support anything worthwhile
(spoiler chars, supersedes, cancels). Courtesy copies are *extremely* annoying
and IIRC, pine doesn't even mark them as such. As for Gnus, I wouldn't even 
know where to start. It's the most feature-ridden newsreader there is.

= Point Gnus

* perform operations on groups of messages using Pine's aggregate
  command (;)

... which doesn't support regexps.

= Point Gnus

* flag messages as new, answered, deleted, or important

... and mark their respective folders, including mail notification et al
like this: 
   *    4: nnml+robin:Pine-ML    Last read on 23/02/99
   ^	^  ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^
   1	2  3	      4
1: ticked articles in group
2: how many articles
3: backend (here: local mail backend)
4: name of group (arbitrary)

= Point Gnus

* create macros using Pine's ``-I'' (initial keystrokes)
  command-line argument

No comment. We all know what Emacs stands for.

= Point Gnus

* plug in your favorite editor, encryption programs, and other programs
  that help you process your messages

Speaking of encryption: it's a political thing, so pine will not have PGP
support, but can you tell me how you will get PGP 6.0i to work under Windos?

= Point Gnus

* pipe a message, or group of messages, through an external program

Under Windos? Nope.

= Point Gnus

* search through a message, group of messages, or group of folders

I must be doing something horribly wrong here, but it just doesn't work for
me the way I want it. I do, however, have a neat little plug-in that uses
igrep. And a cute GUI for the searches. Including regexps.

= Point Gnus

* filter your messages as they arrive by using an external program
  (such as procmail) on your IMAP server.

Well, that's kindalike nothing to do with pine, does it? Apart from the
procmail stuff, Gnus offers some very neat "fancy splitting", though.

= Point Gnus

* use roles to easily switch personas (available in Pine 4.10 and
  later)

Yup. Finally.

= No Point

		       --==| Gnus 12 : Pine 1 |==--

> And if there are key features that you think Pine is lacking, please let
> me know those too. To me, a key feature that Pine doesn't have is that it
> doesn't do true threading and it can't collapse/expand threads. 

Oh dear, where to start... 

* scoring and killfiling with a keystroke; 
  one could use procmail, but C-k k is simpler.

* automatically cutting signatures in replies

* colour; check Sven's mutt setup and you'll see what I mean. Neat.

* a more consistent UI. "e", "q", "C-c" - nope.

* more stuff to customize using an easy language - if I don't find a
  solution, I'll write one in Lisp. Simple.

And so on... But then again, I'm comparing a 80MB Lisp engine to an
excellent stand-alone MUA with a sucky editor. Not fair.

> graphical) environment again, I'd seriously consider changing to

Gnus. Incidentally, XEmacs runs under Un*x, Windos and a lot of other OSes, 
so - well...

> I think the main reason that I'm so enthusiastic about Pine is that I'm
> able to get all the Unix-like power and flexibility on MS Windows.  

No you don't. You still don't have the Un*x environment. No bash. No
vim. Nothing. Unless you install all that, too.

Ummm... Yeah. Amen. If you're still reading this, you need to get even more 
of a life than me, I guess. That's all folks...

-- 
Robin S. Socha  <http://socha.net/>

---

From: Daniel Sands <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 09:06:06 -0700

> used to do this stuff in the Ole Days, too, so here goes...
[Numerous GNUS features]

It is also worth mentioning that Pine is not intended to be a do-all, complete
solution to all your mail needs.  As the documentation says, it is intended to
be a lightweight program with an easy-to-use interface and a few advanced
features.  It does this very well IMHO.

> Gnus. Incidentally, XEmacs runs under Un*x, Windos and a lot of other OSes, 

Uhhh, beg to differ... Windos is not an OPERATING system. :-P

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 11:32:51 -0500 (EST)

On 24 Feb 1999, Daniel Sands <[email-masked]> wrote:
> As the documentation says, it is intended to be a lightweight
> program with an easy-to-use interface and a few advanced features.  

Please point me to where the Pine documentation says that. I have
honestly thought Pine is powerful, but maybe I'm confused and should
seriously start looking for a better program. Suggestions are welcome.

 -Nancy

---

From: Daniel Sands <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 09:46:37 -0700

>From doc/brochure.txt:

Pine(tm) --a Program for Internet News & Email-- is a tool for reading,
sending, and managing electronic messages.  It was designed specifically
with novice computer users in mind, but can be tailored to accommodate the
needs of "power users" as well.  Pine uses Internet message protocols
(e.g. RFC-822, SMTP, MIME, IMAP, NNTP) and runs on Unix and PCs.

The guiding principles for Pine's user-interface were:  careful limitation
of features, one-character mnemonic commands, always-present command
menus, immediate user feedback, and high tolerance for user mistakes. It
is intended that Pine can be learned by exploration rather than reading
manuals.  Feedback from the University of Washington community and many
thousands of Internet sites around the world has been encouraging.

I am not saying that Pine is worthless.  Only that it is excellent for basic
purposes and useless for more advanced purposes.  That is what the designers
aimed for.

In fact, the early code was based on the Elm mail reader.  At the time, Elm
was one of the feature-rich mail programs, but many users found it to be
clunky.  Hence the Pine project.

Personally, I prefer Pine.  It does everything I need--simple mail reading and
replying.

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 17:11:01 -0500 (EST)

> used to do this stuff in the Ole Days, too, so here goes...

To me, this is not offtopic. It's appropriate to discuss how Pine's
features compare to the features of other mailer/newsreaders. This way
the Pine developers get a sense of what features we think are
important and stop some of us from thinking of Pine as a program for
power users.

>  [...]

Since I have four un-networked computers here and ISPs all around the
United States, I need to use an IMAP client for my mail and news
message processing. As I look at competitors to Pine, I can't
seriously consider non-IMAP clients.

> Yup, but different browsers are just one keystroke away. Also, Emacs sports 

Different browsers are easily available in Pine too. Hilite the URL,
press Enter, type A to editApp, and then enter your alternate browser.

> (spoiler chars, supersedes, cancels). 

It does support Supersedes and Cancel headers (but you have to fill
them in by hand). You can insert ^L into a message but Pine doesn't
know how to interpret it (they show up as a question mark on my
system). It would be nice if Pine interpreted ^L the way most Unix
newsreaders do.

> Courtesy copies are *extremely* annoying

When you reply to a news message, Pine asks

 Follow-up to news group(s), Reply via email to author or Both?

I -- and others who understand news -- almost always answer F (for
Followup) to this question. This is a user education problem and users
of just about every newsreader are guilty of the sin of cc'ing a news
message.

> and IIRC, pine doesn't even mark them as such. 

No, it doesn't but one of these days I'll write a sending filter that
will do that (or maybe someone has already done that and could share
it). At least Pine has the option of creating sending filters.

>    *    4: nnml+robin:Pine-ML    Last read on 23/02/99

You can get Pine to do this kind of thing using aggregate operations
on folder lists. I've got some Pine macros (using `pine -I
long-string-of-commands') that I use to create a list of my folders
that have important msgs or new msgs or whatever. Unfortunately Pine
doesn't show the number of important, new, or whatever msgs. (I'm sure
Gnus is more powerful in this respect but I wanted to let you know
that you can do this kind of thing with Pine.)

> No comment. We all know what Emacs stands for.

Actually I don't. I guess the "macs" stands for macros but what
does the "E" stand for?

> support, 

You can plug in support for PGP or S/MIME or whatever the next great
encryption scheme is. Plug and play is the way to go for this kind of
thing IMHO.

> but can you tell me how you will get PGP 6.0i to work under Windos?

I don't know what the issue is here -- can you elaborate??

> * pipe a message, or group of messages, through an external program

This is on the UW list of features that will be added. This is my #1
PC-Pine feature request.

> me the way I want it. 

What are you doing? And what happens that isn't what you want? I like
this Pine feature quite a bit.

> procmail stuff, Gnus offers some very neat "fancy splitting", though.

Yes, it does have something to do with Pine. It's another example of
the Pine developers understanding Internet standards and plug & play.
When there is a standard for IMAP server filtering, which there will
be ( see http://www.cyrusoft.com/sieve/ ), Pine will be all set to
plug it in and work with it. And then if there's a competing standard
(which there always is), a user could choose to plug that in instead.
This is just the same as the way Pine does encryption -- let the user
choose which program to use. And don't lock the program into a
particular component.

> * automatically cutting signatures in replies

Pine can do this. To find out all the dirty details, read the help on
enable-sigdashes and strip-from-sigdashes-on-reply. (Have you even
looked at the features in the Pine 4.10 Setup Config screen??)

> * a more consistent UI. "e", "q", "C-c" - nope.

What Pine UI inconsistencies are you referring to?

> vim. Nothing. Unless you install all that, too.

Actually I do have bash and vim. I use the most excellent gvim, and
Cygwin for bash.

Nancy

-- 
For Pine info & links, see www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 17:23:54 -0500 (EST)

On 24 Feb 1999, Daniel Sands <[email-masked]> wrote:
> purposes and useless for more advanced purposes.

Now that I've gotten through Robin's list of advanced features he'd
like to see, could you tell us what advanced purposes you think Pine
is "useless for"?

Thanks,
Nancy (who actually used to design news software and is still very
       interested in the design of news and mail tools)

---

From: "Robin S. Socha" <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Feb 1999 08:39:34 +0100

> United States, I need to use an IMAP client for my mail and news message
> processing. As I look at competitors to Pine, I can't seriously consider
> non-IMAP clients.

Well, it isn't a non-IMAP client. It just doesn't offer *all* available
features. I've been using it with IMAP for more than 6 months, though,
without missing much.

>> * easily launch a URL [...]

We were talking of UIs, and I said "mouse click". Besides which, I really
miss my lightning completion (ie automatic completion of commands on first
match) for these cases.

[suboptimal news support]
> It does support Supersedes and Cancel headers (but you have to fill them
> in by hand). 

I don't count that as "support". I count "C" and "S s" as "support".

> You can insert ^L into a message but Pine doesn't know how to interpret
> it (they show up as a question mark on my system). It would be nice if
> Pine interpreted ^L the way most Unix newsreaders do.

How can you insert  with pico? It can be done with vim, but pico?

> This is a user education problem and users of just about every newsreader
> are guilty of the sin of cc'ing a news message.

I'm not only talking news here (where the X-mail-copies: never header is
honoured by Gnus), but also mailing lists. I'm *on* the list. I *don't*
need a Cc. Trust me. Gnus lets you define "reply to *this* ML" in the
parameters for the respective group. Excellent, because there are lists
where Cc:s kinda do make sense.

> it). At least Pine has the option of creating sending filters.

Sure has. Unfortunately, they aren't of much use for 90% of the users
cause they neither know shell nor perl. Again, speaking of UIs, Emacs's
customize function offers an IMO intuitive interface to these functions. I
still find pine's customization section kinda confusing, whereas Emacs' is
hierarchical (ie own screens for group, summary, article, headers, scores
etc). But maybe I'm just stupid.

[...]
> (I'm sure Gnus is more powerful in this respect but I wanted to let you
> know that you can do this kind of thing with Pine.)

It doesn't really come anywhere near Gnus, sorry. I could easily fire up a
summary line that would make you want to cry (IMAP features included). In
fact, that was the feature that made me switch to Gnus in the first place,
because I do get a lot of mail from various accounts.

> Actually I don't. I guess the "macs" stands for macros but what does the
> "E" stand for?

editing.

[PGP]
> encryption scheme is. Plug and play is the way to go for this kind of

I was talking integration. I've got a Mailcrypt menu and mouse menu. I can
do a lot of funky things (like encrypt for remailers and the like) easily,
because the integration of PGP into Emacs (not Gnus, Mailcrypt works for
all Mail/News readers) is tight. GPG is supported, too ;-)

> I don't know what the issue is here -- can you elaborate??

It is entirely GUI based AFAICS. But I might be wrong, I don't work with
Windos.

>> it just doesn't work for me the way I want it.

Do the words "rgrep" and "agrep" ring a bell? Do I have to send you a
screenshot of search-menu.el? }:-> regexps for everything. Very nifty.

>> * filter your messages as they arrive by using an external program
[it's nothing to do with pine]
> Yes, it does have something to do with Pine. It's another example of the
> Pine developers understanding Internet standards and plug & play.  When
> there is a standard for IMAP server filtering, which there will be ( see
> http://www.cyrusoft.com/sieve/ ), Pine will be all set to plug it in and
> work with it. 

And as per usual, it will not be integrated well (cf PGP). We were talking
of powerful UIs, weren't we? When this thing happens, Gnus will use it just
like anything else. mutt will have a menu entry for it. pine?

> (Have you even looked at the features in the Pine 4.10 Setup Config
> screen??)

Not long enough as it seems.

> What Pine UI inconsistencies are you referring to?

If I want to *q*uit, I want to "q"uit. It's got better but it still isn't
100% consistent. Not to be nitpicking here, it's really not a big deal.

> Actually I do have bash and vim. I use the most excellent gvim, and

That's what I said. But just imagine that some people aren't allowed to
install superior software at work. Now what?

Robin

---

From: Michael Talbot-Wilson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 1999 20:03:00 +1030 (CST)

> seriously start looking for a better program. Suggestions are welcome.

       Pine  is  a screen-oriented message-handling tool.  In its
       default configuration, Pine offers an  intentionally  lim-
       ited  set  of functions geared toward the novice user, but
       it also has a growing list of  optional  "power-user"  and
       personal-preference  features.  pinef is a variant of Pine

>From you-know-where.

But the "novice" bit is obsolete.  Novices are now more novice, and
have to have it graphical.

As for better, Robin made (I thought) an impressive argument for
Gnus.  But I would look at MH (or nmh) with the exmh (Tcl/Tk) front
end.  I don't think you will find something inarguably better, but
you may find something that is better in enough ways for you.

--Mike