Well looks like my rant about the state of open source feed readers hit some sites, so I should put in a few clarifications so people understand what I was looking for more specifically. I’ll do it by answering several of the questions people sent me.

“Why not just use Mutt?”

Of course, if I wanted to just use Mutt to read my RSS feeds then I could easily do that. This kind of violates the idea of one program doing one thing really well, but think about the question for a second. Don’t you actually mean: Why not just wire rss2email into procmail through bogofilter and tweak endless rules so that you can then put an rss article into a single email so that your mail and your news are all pleasantly mixed into one big source of information?

That’s a more accurate version of the question. If I used Mutt as my feed reader I must also use 10 other programs that balance in a delicate dance of configuration files. If I use Newsbeuter it just start it and it works.

Also, Newsbeuter has a ton of other nice features Mutt just doesn’t have. My favorite is Podbeuter, which takes any of the podcast enclosures that Newsbeuter found, downloads them in a nice queue, and lets me play them. It’s absolutely the slickest podcast setup yet, and best of all I didn’t have to configure it much. It just kind of worked.

“Mutt does do folders you dumbass!”

No, it doesn’t. I know, you have a key for accessing folders. Yay. I can read a directory of emails. However, if you want to get pedantic about it Mutt actually only reads folders. To even come close to doing folders Mutt would have to start sorting the email into the folders for me, include a rule processing system, and probably run my spam filter for me. As it stands, Mutt relies on shit programs like procmail (fucking hell I hate that thing).

I think this demonstrates why many programmers cannot write software for other people. Programmers absolutely love yak shaving. Hell, I love it to death when I know the end result is gonna rock. For example, right now I’m learning FORTH so that I can use PicForth to code various embedded guitar effects projects using a PIC16 CPU. That’s some serious fucking yak shaving, but that’s what makes it fun.

However, where programmers constantly fuck up is they assume that everyone enjoys yak shaving. They see no problem with a mere mortal setting up postfix+stunnel+imapd+procmail+bogofilter+rss2email+Mutt just to read a news feed. Sure, they’ll claim the journey is simple, right before they dive into a Moby Dick level tale of construction and configuration that still weeks later only works half as well as Newsbeuter.

So yes, I know you can read a subfolder in Mutt. That’s all Mutt does with folders, which means Mutt doesn’t “do folders”.

“Have you tried Bitlbee for IM-to-IRC?”

A few folks mentioned Bitlebee as an option. Bitlbee basically takes all your IM accounts and acts as a proxy that gives you IRC access to them. You can then use irssi to do both your IRC and your IM in one shot.

While this does seem attractive, I never really bothered setting it up. I was fine with mcabber and I had already nuked my IM to the ground before so bitlebee was a bit much.

I had nuked my IM previously because it was just too much to talk with all those folks all the time. I hooked up gchat and was using mcabber mostly to talk to the few people who were interested in still talking to me and a few potential clients.

Yet, yesterday I realized that for the last month or so I hadn’t really been in a good conversation with most of the people on even this stripped down IM setup. Most of the talk has been me talking to them, and then them ignoring me or giving me a one liner.

I’m kind of a blabber mouth on IM, especially when I’m bored, so rather than torture my friends further by bothering them with queries to go eat lunch, I just turned my IM off. It’s probably best given my love of talking that I just use email to converse with my friends.

So yes, people should go try Bitlbee as it does look cool, but for me, it’s kind of pointless now. I just don’t really do IM anymore, and will mostly rely on email with a bit of IRC.

“Looked at CenterICQ instead of mcabber?”

I tried CenterICQ a while back and really didn’t like it. I don’t remember my reasons, but I do remember hating all the tons of features the thing had and how complex it was. Mcabber is kind of crap, since it has the weirdest key setup and almost no docs, but at least it did one thing really well.

“Have you tried Sup instead of Mutt?”

Yes, I tried Sup back in the day, and haven’t tried it since. It seemed pretty cool, but I just didn’t get back to playing with it.

My actual email client is Sylpheed. I like it because it’s quick, works really well, and has just enough features to do what I need. For example, Sylpheed will actually put my email into folders based on simple rules. Already a big win over Mutt.

I might check out Sup soon though because I do like the idea of going all console for my podcasts, news, and email.

The Actual Point Of The Article

I know the title of the article makes it seem like I want people to help me find the Mutt of feed readers, but the actual point of the article is to say I already have. A secondary purpose is to point out just how fucking dumb all the other ones are, and to maybe kick some people in the ass to do better. If I hadn’t found Newsbeuter I might have written one myself, but now I don’t have to.

Hopefully people writing these kinds of programs can clean things up or try something different. I doubt they will though since the point of being a programmer is assuming everything you write is perfect.

Don’t Be That Guy

I gave a presentation once at RubyConf in Denver that was going to cover mathematics, testing, and processes. I just knew I’d be screwed because there’s always that guy in the audience who can’t listen to a presentation without running his fucking mouth “asking” an endless pseudo-question. I absolutely hate that guy because he’s so pedantic, and yet so wrong.

In the process of creating my presentation, I invented the term “That Guy”. In my slides I put mistakes on purpose, and then made fun of That Guy trying to correct me. He of course was focused on the minute tiny details that don’t actually matter in a 40 minute presentation, instead of focusing on the important part of the ideas.

Later in the conference, Tim Bray got attacked by That Guy. He said that you can’t reliably sort Unicode alphabetically. Oh my god, it’s like he said you can’t add numbers or shit in a toilet. Every That Guy in the room started arguing with him, “asking” long fucking questions proposing a solution, or just generally being dickheads with their own self-importance.

Just like the people who think Mutt does folders because it can read mail in another directory. Stop being That Guy. I’m a pretty smart dude, so if I say Mutt doesn’t do folders, don’t assume I’m an idiot. Assume that either the Mutt people didn’t document the bizarre key sequences required for the feature, or that I mean something more complex than your dipshit myopic mind can grasp from that one single sentence.

Thanks For The Advice

Don’t take this blog entry to mean I don’t like hearing about new ideas and software. I love having people send me interesting open source projects they’re working on. So, please shoot me more suggestions. Just don’t be That Guy.