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Comment by tumult | Hacker News Reader

The performance of some of these apps is appalling. The Sparrow GMail client idles in the background on my MacBook Air around 20 or 30% CPU usage on one core. If you try to scroll the list of mail, resize the window, or breathe on it wrong, it will chug, the graphics will stutter, and it will peg itself at 100% cpu for several seconds. If I have it running, it cuts my estimated remaining battery life from 4 hours to 1 hour.

Kiwi 2, the twitter client, uses 100mb of ram for one twitter account. What?

I know most people aren't going to check these numbers or care, but when I open an email client and feel my laptop getting warm underneath my hands, something is wrong.

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Sparrow may not be that terrible; on first launch, it fetches, caches, and indexes the entirety of your Gmail account. I'm hoping that the CPU usage will subside once it finishes that process, but I still have a few thousand messages to go...

Edit: After finishing caching everything, Sparrow's CPU usage dropped to ~0% when idle. Scrolling, however, causes it to rocket up to ~70-80% on a 2.66 GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro.

It also uses about twice as much memory as Mail.app.

Anyway the interface is so much better that I'm willing to make the tradeoff!

The app has some serious spikes, but just like you said, the interface blows away Mail.app. Considering how infrequent most people should have their email open, it is well worth the cpu usage.

I'll trade processor time for usability any time. As long as animations don't get choppy or the app starts to feel sluggish or battery drain skyrockets, I couldn't care less if an app is using a lot of processor time.

Actually, Skype is a good example of how to not do it. Having Skype run in the background decreases my battery life by a good quarter. Actually talking to someone over Skype can easily get the laptop fans going. Skype even freezes for a few moments every now and then. And Skype is still a tremendously useful app, so I will even take this abuse. (The new design of the Skype beta for Mac is a different matter, though)

Sparrow on the other hand is smooth sailing.

Get your downvoting fingers ready... ;-)

AL-motherf###ing-PINE

I swear, I've tried to get in to gui mail apps. I even got pretty far once with gmail's offline mode. I've tried so damn hard, but I can't stay away from alpine. It's so fast, so small, I never have to look for anything. All the commands are staring me in the face at all times. You cannot ask for a better UI.

[p.s. how do you emit literal asterisks here, I've never run across this problem before?]

I swear, I've tried to get into console mail apps. But I've yet to find one designed for the post-1975 era. Hint: I have a bunch of accounts, all using IMAP, and I don't run an SMTP server locally.

Mutt, Pine, sup, and everybody else: I'm looking at you.

You can use alpine and mutt just fine with remote imap and smtp, including gmail. It's not hard.

Apart from "they look old" (which is a fake argument), what about console mail clients makes them feel as though they aren't designed for the modern era? Sure, they don't look like other mail clients, but that's as much other clients' fault as theirs. What exactly about their UI, intrinsically, do you dislike? Or do you just love the mouse too much to give it up?

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