Re: Good News Reader?
Thanks for all the responses. So far it seems that slrn and Gnus are
the most popular, and Gnus is the most feature rich (which comes at a
disadvantage - how do you remember which feature you need to use and
when to use it?).
On Thu, Oct 21, 1999 at 06:55:03AM +0000, George Bonser wrote:
> I use tin for text based news reading. knews for GUI.
Are these programs any good?
On Thu, Oct 21, 1999 at 09:01:58PM +0000, Colin Marquardt wrote:
> * Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au> writes:
>
> > Things I dislike about gnus:
> > - last 10 times I tried running it, it always crashed on startup,
> > without giving any indication of a problem. xemacs completely died (no
> > response from anything) and I had to kill it. There have been problems
> > with the news server (ie currupted overview files), so perhaps it caused
> > my local files to become currupted (not sure).
>
> This isn´t really Gnus´ fault, I think. It works fine here.
The problem has now gone away.
> > - can't get PGP support to work. Haven't even tried GPG.
>
> Use mailcrypt. The newest version (3.5.5,
> http://cag-www.lcs.mit.edu/mailcrypt/) supports GPG, but
> unfortunately not MIME-PGP, only clearsigning. Also no automated
> key-fetching for GPG. But that shouldn´t be too far away.
Do you mean MIME-PGP support should be coming, too?
> > - requires xemacs, and xemacs is huge and slow (I don't have enough
>
> Not really true :-) AFAIR, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen himself uses FSF
> Emacs.
Emacs is very big (about 27Mb according to apt, if I remember correctly).
> > - not really sure about MIME support. I read somewhere that it
> > was limited to processing mail with metamail (which I didn't like
> > about trn and slrn), but the admit the documentation could be wrong.
>
> The current stable version needs external support. Metamail for
> processing gotten and TM (Tools for MIME) for creating MIME
> stuff. It works just fine for me, though (but then, I don´t use it
> much).
>
> However, thare is a new version not too far away (it is already
> packaged, but not ready for the faint of the heart yet). This
> so-called pGnus has native, excellent MIME support.
This new version (I just tried it) seems very good.
> > - requires memorizing complicated sequence of keystrokes.
>
> But has a menu. And (X)Emacs can teach you commands:
>
> | `teach-extended-commands-p' (Customizable user variable)
> |
> | *If true, then `execute' will teach you keybindings.
> | Any time you execute a command with execute which has a
> | shorter keybinding, you will be shown the alternate binding before the
> | command executes.
Thanks for the info.
> > - can't forward mail as MIME attachments (not that I have seen anyway).
>
> Use TM, and do S O m (calls the function gnus-uu-digest-mail-forward;
> see, it also can make digests of mails :-)
I tried S o m, but it only did one message. I guess I should
really try S O m ;-)
However, I originally though -uu- meant uuencoded?
> > - can't reply to multiple messages at the same time.
>
> Thanks you! I just discovered a new function! :-) (And that was
> with intuition: once you get the knack of it...)
>
> Process-mark the articles you want to reply to (with the # keey in
> the Summary buffer), then use r, f, R or F (reply or wide reply,
> uppercase means quote original message).
Wow! It works! (when I tried it - I am currently using mutt)
> Gnus can do expiry without a gateway (different for each mailgroup
> if you want), so the "dislike"-points are moot.
This is one feature I have seen but not yet tested. I noted with
the latest version of PGnus (0.97?) if I pushed 'g' to get any new
articles from the group list, then the E flag for all articles
that I manually marked for expiry were forgotten (is this a bug?)
> Have I already said I really like Gnus? :-) If you want, I can dig
I get the impression you must hate it ;-)
> up URLs to tutorials tomorrow or next week.
Yes please.
> PS. ...and we haven´t even talked about the *really* cool features of
> Gnus... like auto-scoring (learns what you want to read and what not (by
> "artificial stupidity", to quote the manual) and scores accordingly).
Please could you explain how you use auto-scoring? I have a vague
impression of the theory behind how it works, would be interested
in knowing how to use it in practise.
Thanks in advance.
On Sun, Oct 24, 1999 at 04:02:01AM +0000, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> I run gnus on emacs (not xemacs), I have not had an emacs
> crash in years, and it is integrated with mailcrypt (on certain
> groups, I have gnus hiding the pgp/gpg signature in the article
> buffer, while verifying the signature _automatically_).
I suspect the problem may have been the currupted overview file
on the NNTP server. Unfortunately all news readers seem to get
badly confused, not just gnus. Then again, maybe that is to be
expected ;-)
> I also like the adaptive word scoring, so that topics and
> authors that I dislike slhowly slip below my radar. I like being able
> to build the score on articles based on several rules, apart from the
> adaptive learning.
How do you do this? How do you tell Gnus that you dislike a particular
author and/or topic?
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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