RLPF.ar

Don't answer that!

It seems lately, though, that the developers of some well-known software packages just don't think the way I do. Take e-mail. I like to use an IMAP client instead of, say, gmail's web interface because it can save messages on disk and I can use them when I don't have access to the Internet. This, to me, is a really logical workflow:

• When you access a folder, download the message headers. That's fast, because it skips the content.
• When you read a message, download the content and save it on disk. That way, you get off-line access and you don't have to endure long download times while the client fetches every message.

Simple and logical, right? Well, let's look at the main players in the Linux mail client space:

• Evolution: You can download all of every message all at once, or never cache any messages locally. Worse, its user interaction is terrible. Suppose you use the up or down arrow to move quickly to the message list (hardly an exotic user action). Evolution fetches each message you touch in turn, one by one, even though obviously you're only interested in the one where you stopped the cursor. Tremendous waste of time, and a clear case of programmers cutting corners at the expense of user experience. "Asynchronous fetching is hard. Letting the user change her mind about which message to read is hard." Lazy.
• Thunderbird: You can download all of every message all at once, or never cache any messages locally. It offers one improvement: you can ask it to cache only the last 30 days. Its handling of fonts is extremely sloppy to boot. I found sometimes, when replying to a message, the font would be enormous. If I changed it to be a reasonable size for writing, then the recipient would get a message with a very small font. How hard is it to display a message the same size in both the reading and writing interfaces? Apparently, the Thunderbird programmers haven't mastered it.
• KMail: I searched every preference screen I could find, and didn't see any option to cache messages locally. That's a pity; otherwise, its features seemed reasonably thorough (except for the occasional crash).

So finally I ended up with -- Wanderlust, which is a text-interface messaging client that runs in Emacs. Just to be clear about what this means: I had to step backward about two decades in terms of interface design to be able to use a workflow that is, frankly, common sense.

Which leads to the question: What the hell is wrong with programmers today?

Anyway... Wanderlust was a beast to set up, due to unclear documentation, an out of date (and password-protected) download page and the need for some customization hacks that I never would have figured out without the wanderlust e-mail list. But now that I have it working -- it's fantastic! I can move through new e-mails quickly, go back to old ones instantaneously, and write e-mail when not connected to the Internet (to be sent next time I log in). Wanderlust goes one better in download efficiency: You can choose when to retrieve attachments, or not to fetch them at all. It's not as pretty as a point-and-click GUI, but it's more functional than the lot of them put together.

So, with apologies to open source developers (who are volunteering their time), I have to refuse to admit that what I want is so outrageous. I get it: they want to dumb down the interface for "normal" users. That's reasonable as far as it goes, but when it means discarding ways of doing things that are sunshine-obvious to this amateur programmer, we're entering the territory of Harrison Bergeron software design: egalitarianism by crippling the swift. Fail.