use rss support in gnus for emacs. tada it can read email too. so he can get rid of mutt. not sure how much more minimal you can get than rss-as-news-articles

and what is with this trend of people buying core2duo boxes to run dvtm? top won't bother reporting idle of greater precision than 99.9 %

anywho, it seems emacs can give him his console orgasm while dropping a dynamic runtime that ties it together. news, email, irc, im (via bitlbee), web, and of course editing text now and then