Disruptive Proactivity

Like many of my friends, I spend most of my time in the terminal, and hence, for over a decade, I ran pine as my mail client. I still spend a huge amount of time in the terminal, but for a while recently, ran Mail.app on my mac, rather than pine (yes, I know it’s been renamed alpine about 3 years ago, but the finger programming is still there, as is the symlink).

There were immediate reasons for the switch – using an mbox format INBOX mean the locking was annoying when my phone had an IMAP connection open and check to see if there was new mail; pine would tell me about it. After a server move, I’ve got the practical option of MBX which doesn’t annoy in that way. So, the question becomes, do I switch back.

I think the answer is yes, but for reasons that have very little to do with my email client. They both work similarly, and the only thing that I’d really miss from Mail.app is the smart folders; but that could be achieved in other ways. But what really pushed me away from Mail.app was the context switch.

When I was looking at my email, and I spend a fair bit of time there, it was a matter of switching to the app, seeing nothing there, and switching back to terminal.

Everyone who has ever shown someone terminal knows it’s a rather, erm, specific environment. The issue wasn’t switching to Mail.app, but switching context back; which left me far more distracted and hence massively less productive. If I wanted to stay with Mail.app, what would be the equivalent switch in writing code on remote servers? (or should I move away from remote servers)

Nothing to do with Mail.app, but a lot to do with everything else. But I do wonder, what’s the equivalent of that (on remote machines) for editing code in the terminal. I’ve not found textmate and expandrive to work perfectly in that regard. Any ideas?