Philosophy.txt in sup-0.0.3

- old
+ new
@@ -9,50 +9,57 @@
 folder is 350 megs and Mutt sits there for 60 seconds while it opens
 it. Keeping up with the all the new traffic is painful, even with
 Mutt's excellent threading features, simply because there's so much of
 it---a single thread can span several pages, and God help you if you
 lag behind. And Mutt is probably the best email client out there in
-terms of threading and mailing list support.
+terms of threading and mailing list support. God help me if I try and
+throw Thunderbird at that.
 
-The principle problem with traditional clients is that they place a
-high mental cost on the user for each incoming email, by forcing them
-to ask:
- - Should I keep this email, or delete it?
- - If I keep it, where should I file it?
+The principle problem with traditional clients is that they deal with
+individual pieces of email, and place a high mental cost on the user
+for each incoming email, by forcing them to ask: Should I keep this
+email, or delete it?  If I keep it, where should I file it?
 
-For example, I've spent the last 10 years of my life laboriously
-hand-filing every email message I received and feeling a mild sense of
-panic every time an email was both "from Mom" and "about school". The
-massive amounts of email that many people receive, and the cheap cost
-of storage, have made these questions both more costly and less useful
-to answer.
+I've spent the last 10 years of my life laboriously hand-filing every
+email message I received and feeling a mild sense of panic every time
+an email was both "from Mom" and "about school". The massive amounts
+of email that many people receive, and the cheap cost of storage, have
+made these questions both more costly and less useful to answer.
 
-As a long-time Mutt user, when I watched people use GMail, I saw them
-use email differently from how I had ever used it. I saw that making
-certain operations quantitatively easier (namely, search) resulted in
-a qualitative difference in usage. And I saw that thread-centrism had
-many advantages over message-centrism, especially when volume was high.
+As a long-time Mutt user, when I first watched people use GMail, I saw
+them use email differently from how I had ever used it. I saw that
+making certain operations quantitatively easier (namely, search)
+resulted in a qualitative difference in usage: you don't have to worry
+about filing correctly, because you can always find things later by
+search. And I saw that thread-centrism had many advantages over
+message-centrism when message volume was high.
 
 So, in many ways, I believe GMail has taken the right approach to
 handle both of the factors above, and much of the inspiration for Sup
-was based on GMail. Ultimately, GMail wasn't right for me, which is
-why the idea for Sup was born.
+was based on GMail. I think it's to the GMail designers' credit that
+they started with a somewhat ad-hoc idea (hey, we're really good at
+search engines, so can we build an email client on top of one?) and
+managed to build something that was actually better than everything
+else out there. But ultimately, GMail wasn't right for me (see FAQ),
+which is why the idea for Sup was born.
 
 Sup is based on the following principles, which I more or less stole
 directly from GMail:
 
 - An immediately accessible and fast search capability over the
   entire email archive eliminates most of the need for folders,
   and eliminates the necessity of having to ever delete email.
 
-- Labels eliminate the remaining need for folders.
+- Labels eliminate what little need for folders that search doesn't
+  eliminate.
 
 - A thread-centric approach to the UI is much more in line with how
-  people operate than dealing with individual messages is. A message
-  and its content deserve the same treatment in the vast majority
-  of cases.
+  people operate than dealing with individual messages is. In the vast
+  majority of cases, a message and its context should be subject to
+  the same treatment.
 
 Sup is also based on many ideas from mutt and Emacs and vi, having to
 do with the fantastic productivity of a console- and keyboard-based
 application, the usefulness of multiple buffers, the necessity of
 handling multiple email accounts, etc.
 
+Give it a go and let me know what you think.