When comparing Mutt vs cmus, the Slant community recommends cmus for most people. In the question“What are the best shell powertools?” cmus is ranked 8th while Mutt is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose cmus is:
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Terminal based
Pro Small and efficient
Pro Active development
Even though it was first released in 1995, Mutt still enjoys an active community following it and having new releases constantly.
Pro It runs inside the terminal
It doesn't display HTML email, fonts, or graphical elements.
Pro Compose mails in your favorite editor
Edit mails efficiently with an editor you already can work fluently with.
Pro Highly configurable macros
Pro Threads emails
Pro Work with regular expressions
Mails can be filtered, deleted, flagged, etc. with regular expressions which makes mail management very efficient.
Pro CLI only
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Pro Does not use a lot of memory
Cmus only uses about 15 MB. This is a very small and light media player, which is ideal for people with low end hardware.
Pro Works very well with tags from MusicBrainz database
cmus will factor in additional data from the MusicBrainz database while sorting. For example sort orders for arist or album, and the original release date for an album (in the case of a re-release).
Pro Good library structure
A lot of music players may act more like playlist viewers rather than a music library. cmus sorts by Artist > Year > Album.
Pro Fast
A lot of music players will be slow when starting if they have huge libraries, but CMus starts fast no matter the library size.
Pro Customizable keybindings for a personal experience
You can add keybindings for just about anything - including seeking (forward/backwards 1 minute, for example) which isn't supported by all music players.
Pro No mouse required
cmus does not require a mouse as it runs in the terminal
Pro Open source extensions and scripts
On GitHub you can find the official WIKI where there are a dozen extensions and scripts from color themes to a lyrics viewer and the ability to play YouTube songs.
Cons
Con Terminal-based
It runs inside the terminal so it doesn't display HTML email, fonts, or graphical elements.
Con No album art
cmus does not display album art
Con CLI only
No graphical interface is available for cmus. Everything is done through CLI (command line interface).
Con Difficult to use
Cmus uses odd keyboard shortcuts such as "C" to pause, "E" to add songs to queue, and "4" to edit the queue.
Con Can't play wavepack files
