Re: newsgroup readers

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu>]

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002 irvine@vuosaari.hai.fi wrote:

> Hei
>
> I have only ever accessed newsgroups using netscape under windows.
> I was wondering whether anyone would be so kind as to give a novice
> some advice on what clients are worth looking trying under linux.
>
> I here that gnus is very powerful but I am a vi man - I suppose
> I could learn emacs.
>
> Saw some screenshots of knews and it looked alright.
>
> Anyway, I await comments.

The two most popular "power" News clients seem to be

1) Pan: GUI client (gtk based)

2) slrn: runs on the terminal.

Both are GPL'd and actively maintained. I use slrn myself. I like a lot of
things about slrn, and particularly the fact that it is extremely fast to
use over a dialup (56k) link.

I think your choice between the two would come down to whether you want to
go console or gui. As you mentioned, Gnus is another option, and it may be
more powerful than either of the above, but if you don't use emacs
already, this will probably involve some learning overhead for you.

Also, I've noticed that using network stuff within emacs is noticeably
slower over dialup than programs than specialist programs like slrn.  I
think this may have something to do with the fact that emacs runs
interpreted code to do stuff, which slows things down.

                                       Best regards, Faheem Mitha.