Hi, I am using pine/alpine. The key thing for alpine, is that you should look for the switch that show the cursor. >From memory it is show-cursor but you will find it in the config file. I also changed the way messages are presented to show me a little less info andI set a few things regarding where read mail need to go. For the off-line reading/writing, what i do is the following: 1. install exim4, a mail transfer agent that then runs on your local box. Alpine will by default talk to the local mta which could be sendmail or any other, but I use exim4. For retrieving mail, I use a package called fetchmail. HTH, Willem On Sun, 5 Sep 2010, aerospace1028 at hotmail.com wrote: > > Hello, > I have been running archlinux for a few months now and enjoy the availability of speakup. Although I primarily run in the gnome desktop, I like being able to quickly get access to the text consoles without having to go through the hassle of pulling out my braillenote and juggling between the keyboard and the braille-display. > > Thank you very much to the developers, maintainers and contributors to speakup. > > One area I am interested in exploring, is shifting from thunderbird to the text-console (either with alpine, or mutt I presume). > > I'm not sure which is easier to learn as a beginner, alpine or mutt? I don't actually use thunderbird for e-mail as much as a news reader (through port 119: nntp). I subscribe to a newsgroup with several sub-forums; I like to connect and download the new unread messages to my computer then read the messages off-line and compose my replies and send them to a queue to be sent out next time I connect to the newsgroup again. Is this easily accomplishable with either alpine or mutt? > > Also, are there any special settings in speakup I should be aware of when operating either alpine or mutt? I think I read on www.stormdragon.us that it's recommended to have speakup in highlight tracking mode (toggled with the caps-lock + CTRL + 8 keystroke on a laptop). Are there any other environment variables or speakup switches that enhance the ability to interact with text-based e-mail/news-readers? > > I consider myself a comfortable beginner with the text-consoles and speakup, so please be patient as I try to expand my skill-set here. This is more complex then anything I've tried on the command-line before. I realize there'll be a bit of a learning curve as I transition from the graphical environment I'm more familiar with to the console. I figure I'll have some more questions as I get my feet wet. > > Thank you:-) > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > -- This message is subject to the CSIR's copyright terms and conditions, e-mail legal notice, and implemented Open Document Format (ODF) standard. The full disclaimer details can be found at http://www.csir.co.za/disclaimer.html. This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. MailScanner thanks Transtec Computers for their support.