"We" (meaning not you, apparently) are still doing that kind of thing because we know we'll spend thousands of days using the tool, so a few hours spend leaning it seems like a bargain. I could just as easily ask why "we" (meaning you) are still getting confused between "discoverability" and "usability" after decades of silly arguments like this.

Don't use mutt, that's fine. But come up with some better justifications. (edit for full disclosure: I don't use mutt either, having to deal professionally with enough unreadable-in-plain-text mail that it makes more sense for me to do everything in Thunderbird.)

I put time in when I feel like the tool may solve an issue or problem I have and when I think there will be a ROI for the time I spend doing it.

This seems like a pretty reasonable justification to me. Having spent a lot of time authoring emails in different tools, I'm comfortable with what I have. If what I have does what I want and the other tool that people are telling me is better has a disclaimer like the above, then what exactly am I doing wrong?

I'm all for trying out new tools and I spend hours doing so every week. I have to pick and choose what it is that I utilize. I wasn't arguing that the tool might not be valuable for some folks, just that it did a very good job of un-selling me, very quickly.

Am I supposed to eschew powerful tools because there wasn't a UX guy involved in the project?

If I cared that much about ease of configuration, I'd use Textmate instead of Vim, and Colloquy instead of irssi.

This is my fault for not explaining why I wasn't going to look into it more. According to the features it has listed, it offers me no obvious advantages to my current tools and claims to be difficult to setup and configure.

Beyond that, if you truly want adoption for a tool, you'd invest time into making sure that you remove the obstacles of someone utilizing it. This is a tool that hasn't had any major releases since "September 15, 2010" and hasn't had any commits for two months.

Can you imagine that software that is around since 1995 is sort of done by now?

As silly as it sounds I think most of these tools are just being overly appreciated by a group who (at least sub-consciously) think of themselves as cool/badass for having some hacker-style terminal in front of them, you know it's true.

Hit me all you want, but the same applies to Vim and Emacs for a large percentage of people who admire these tools.

People religiously defend them just because they are 20 something year old terminal GNU/Unixy programs.

If someone came up with Vim today, with a slick polished GUI interface, etc... you'd find far less people talking about how great it is and you'd find the same people who are appreciating them today, making fun of it.

I know that's a generalisation and doesn't involve everyone but I think it is not insignificant.

There are a minority who use and need the tool and appreciate it for what it is and have been long time users. For every 1 of those people, there are thousands more who simply follow the teachings of the cult to be in the cool nerds club.

There seems to be a pattern here, a recipe for a shitty (once useful) program that is no longer relevant that a group just doesn't want to let it go.

It kinda goes like this,

1. Be a 20-something year old program written by some GNU/Unix kernel/hardcore/early developer

2. Run in terminal with a million options and parameters

3. Be extensible with all sorts of weird text file configs, plugins etc...

4. Have a short weird-sounding name that is an abbreviation of some other weird phrase

That's all you need. Then no matter how terrible the user experience is and how outdated and irrelevant your program has become, you'll always have that cult who religiously love your program and insist on extending it so it can be a space shuttle as well as a text editor and an email client.

I should point out I'm not mocking any application in particular and I think many of these tools were fantastic for their times and some of them are still quite good today but my rant is towards this obsessive religious overly-appreciative culture of praising these softwares.

We are past that age of black screens and terminals and horrible user experiences. They were fine for their times but not anymore. I'm not gonna put up with an application that is almost as old as myself and spend hours to configure it just to be a little more efficient.

The efficiency argument seems more like an excuse, because you don't want to admit that you are putting up with the downsides of the application because of all other nerd-culture reasons.

</rant>

Or, perhaps, the tools do something well, are flexible in their approach, and, by way of incremental improvements and configurations over time, fit very hand-in-glove with those who've been using them for some time.

I'd used multiple email programs before finding my way to mutt, including various GUI programs. I'd used elm and pine briefly and somewhat enjoyed them. My primary mailer prior to mutt was Netscape's built-in mail client (NN3/4). The main problems with that were instability and some lack of flexibility.

Mutt took a week or so of getting used to ... and then ... just worked.

Not having an integrated editor (e.g.: making use of vim) was a huge win. One of the huge benefits of console-mode tools is that they can make use of one another in this way.

I've used a great many email clients since encountering mutt, and none are as fast, effective, reliable, and efficient as mutt. I keep coming back.

My complaints? Search through large volumes of mail (10s to 100s of thousands of messages) is slow. Google's use of tags is really useful, and more flexible than a highly-structured set of mailboxes. There are add-ons / forks of mutt which provide both features.

There's also a lot to be said for tools which work over a minimal configuration -- 24x80 vt100 emulation over serial line (your "last ditch" remote access method for most servers), SSH, Connectbot, console, etc.

Knock them all you want. The tools are useful, ubiquitous, standard, and effective.

Add in that they run it from a Mac and I'm on-board with you.

lol.

Valid point and I fall into this camp for all sorts of key software (e.g. you'd never catch me spending more than 5 mins tweaking a new web browser).

For other software, e.g. my editor, my mail client - software i'm producing content in, rather than consuming, i'll happily put in a few hours up front to get comfortable on the grounds that i will reap a greater reward in time saved medium term.

If I could have seen that there would have been some value outside of what I currently use, I'd totally look into it. I too am more likely to spend some time messing around with editors, IDEs and other tools than I am email clients though.

Something difficult to set up and/or configure can still be worth the suffering. Sure, it'd be great if it was easy to configure to boot, but sometimes pain now can reap greater payback down the line...

This may be stretching the applicable domain a bit, but I think the concept of YAGNI applies to the time/effort spent on configuring primitive tools to suit use cases that -may- present themselves in the future.

i agree, that seems like a huge pain in the ass to configure when sparrow is working fine for me.