User Guide overhaul

[bzbug]

The User Guide right now is closer to a reference than to a guide for beginners. It talks a lot about secondary details and additional features for configuration before the beginner can even set up his mail accounts and try all those features discussed in the guide.

Expected Behaviour

1. I, a beginner who's only used Web clients from Tech Giants for mail, go to User Guide and the first thing I find there is a How To Set Up Your Accounts and Start Receiving and Sending Mail before I read anything else that requires me to already have a mail account set up. Including descriptions of the UI that is only accessible after you set up an account and receive some mail in your client.

2. I expect a Basic Defaults config file explained in detail for that purpose and I expect the file to have something that would allow the most standard setup nowdays - mail from multiple accounts that goes into the same folders (for example, mail from [email protected] and [email protected] goes into INBOX folder, but gets tagged somehow with the corresponding mail account it was received from).

3. I expect the most crucial terms like mailbox explained explicitly. Right now I'm still not sure a mailbox is just a folder, because there's some option that's called folder in neomutt, but the guide calls those mailboxes. And also because traditionally, when using Web clients for mail, I've only ever seen the word mailbox used to describe a mail account. [email protected] is one mailbox which has many folders in it, [email protected] is another mailbox with its own folders. And how do tags differ from flags? What is spool file? The man page doesn't make it any clearer, but it gets mentioned in the User Guide before it gets explained.

Actual Behaviour

I now know a lot about UI that I can't even see in my actuall neomutt on my PC, because I haven't set up any accounts yet, I know loads about many tiny settings like index_format and path shortening for folders in the sidebar and such, but I have no clue how to set up my mail accounts. All that theory that I've read in hopes to find already the explanation of how to set up my accounts, is completely useless because I wasn't even able to try anything out in neomutt while reading. And it's totally unnecessary to start with all those tiny additional features when oftentimes the user wants to be able to use the primary function of the programm as soon as possible and set everything else up later, in his own pace.

The guide is, indeed, not a guide but a reference, it talks about features with the mindset of a neomutt developer, not an actual new user. Hello, beginner, I'll show you full description of UI before you are even able to see that UI with your own eyes. Hello, beginner, this is some hook called folder-hook, it's just one of the features of neomutt, not something that you should know about first and foremost if you want to set up your accounts already.

The explanations, the whole Guide should be ordered not in the way that makes sense to a developer of neomutt, but in the way that makes sense to a user of neomutt. The features should be introduced based on most common use-cases, not on the structure of the program, and the most primary function of the program (sending and receiving mail) should be set up and explained before anything else.

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It would also be nice if someone pointed to me where I can find the explanation of how to set up multiple accounts that would be managed from the same folders (without having to switch between accounts in order to access their mail, the folders should be for all accounts at once, like in all modern Web clients for mail that allow for mail retrieval from other mail accounts via IMAP/POP3).