ka@spanky.UUCP (06/06/83)
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1. OOOOvvvveeeerrrrvvvviiiieeeewwww
Vnews is a program for reading USENET news. It is based on
readnews but has a CRT oriented user interface. The command
line options are identical. The list of available commands
is quite similar, although since vnews is a "visual"
interface, most vnews commands do not have to be terminated
by a newline.
Vnews is an experiment in writing a good user interface.
The only way I can tell how successful I have been is by the
responses I receive, so please send you comments, good or
bad, to decvax!harpo!houxm!spanky!ka. (Bug reports should
be sent to the same address.)
Vnews uses the first 22 lines of the screen to display the
current article. Line 23 is the secondary prompt line, and
is used to input string arguments to commands. Line 24
contains several fields. The first field is the prompt
field. If vnews is at the end of an article, the prompt is
"next?"; otherwise the prompt is "more?". The second field
is the newsgroup field, which displays the current
newsgroup, the number of the current article, and the number
of the last article in the newsgroup. The third field
contains the current time, and the last field contains the
word "mail" if you have mail. When you receive new mail,
the bell on the teminal is rung and the word mail appears in
capital letters for 30 seconds.
2. CCCCoooommmmmmmmaaaannnnddddssss
Most of the readnews commands have vnews counterparts and
vice versa. Some differences are:
- Vnews does not have the X command because I don't think
it belongs in readnews anyway. (It should be a
separate program.)
- It lacks an H command. I don't think that there is
enough demand to justify this; just escape to the shell
and say cat $A or sed '/^$/q' $A.
- 2 -
- It lacks a digest command. This would be nice to have,
but it does not seem to be a major deficiency since you
can move around in the article with vnews commands. If
you really miss it, try compiling visual.c with the
-DDIGPAGE option to cause each entry in a digest to
start on a new page.
- To get to the previous group, use the N command with a
'-' argument.
- Vnews has commands commands for moving around in the
article which readnews does not have since they aren't
applicable.
- It has a parent command which will go to the article
that the current article is a followup to, and a write
command that writes out the body of an article without
the header.
- You can refer to the current article from the shell or
while writing a followup as $A.
- The decrypt command always does rot 13; rot 13 seems to
be the default standard and the readnews version
occasionally gets confused.
Each vnews command may be preceded by a count. Some
commands use the count; others ignore it. If count is
omitted, it defaults to one. Some commands prompt for an
argument on the second to the bottom line of the screen.
Standard UNIX erase and kill processing is done on this
argument. The argument is terminated by a return. An
interrupt (delete or break) gets you out of any partially
entered command.
A list of commands follows.
CR A carriage return prints more of the current
article, or goes on to the next article if you are
at the end of the current article.
^B A CONTROL-B goes backwards count pages.
^N or ^Y Go forwards count lines.
^P or ^Z Go backwards count lines.
^D Go forward half a page.
h Go back to the top of the article and display only
the header.
- 3 -
n Go on to the next article, marking the current
article as read.
e Marking the current article as unread and advance
by count articles. Count may be zero.
ug Unsubscribe to the current group. This is a two
character command to ensure that it is not typed
accidentally and to leave room for other types of
unsubscribes (e. g. unsubscribe to discussion).
v Print netnews version.
b or - Go back to the previous article. This is a toggle
(as in readnews), so that two b commands in a row
get you back to the article you started with.
+ Go forward count articles.
q Quit. The .newsrc file is updated.
^\ When sent a quit signal, vnews terminates without
updating .newsrc. As distributed it calls abort()
to generate a core dump; individual sites may want
to delete this call.
c Cancel the current article. Vnews prompts for
confermation before cancelling the article.
Carriage return means yes; anything else means no.
! Prompts for a UNIX command and passes it to the
shell. The environment variable $A is set to the
name of the file containing the current article.
If the last character of the command is a "&",
then the "&" is deleted and the command is run in
the background with stdin, stdout and stderr
redirected to /dev/null. If the command is
missing, the shell is invoked. Use the l command
(or essentially any other command) to turn on the
display after the program terminates.
r Reply to author of article. See f command for
details.
f Post a followup article. I haven't implemented
"recording" messages because I think they're
silly. If the article was posted to a moderated
group, the followup is mailed to the sender of the
article.
- 4 -
Both reply and followup work similarly. A file
containing a header is created and an editor is
invoked on the file. The environment variable $A
is set to the current article in case you want to
refer to it or quote it in your response. The
second argument to the editor is $A, so that if
you run Gosling's emacs, the article will
automaticly appear in the second window.
The header may be edited by the user, a feature I
consider very useful. For example, if sombody
posts an article to both btl.general and
bell.general, you don't want to compound the error
by posting the followup to both btl.followup and
bell.followup. [Yes, I know readnews now allows
this too.]
If you change your mind about replying or posting
a followup article, exit the editor without
writing the file. A message will appear on the
screen to inform you that the response was not
mailed/posted.
l or d Causes the current article to be displayed.
Display of the current article is turned off by
commands which scramble the screen (!, f, and r).
My feeling here is that the user frequently wants
to respond to an article and then go on to the
next article; she/he shouldn't be forced to wait
while the current article is rewritten to the
screen. The l command will also redisplay the
article if the help message is currently
displayed. The mnemonic significance of l is that
is similar to control-L, which redraws the screen.
N Go to a different newsgroup. You are prompted for
a newsgroup name. A null newsgroup name gets the
next group, the name "-" gets the previous group.
The semantics of this command are obscure; I can
only refer you to the equally unenlightenning
description of the N command in the readnews
documentation. If vnews is invoked with the -x
and -r options, N with a null newsgroup name will
exit vnews.
# Prints the numbers of the current article and the
last article in the current newsgroup.
^L Rewrites the screen. CONTROL-L may be typed at
any time.
- 5 -
D Decrypts a joke. It only handles rot 13 jokes.
The D command is a toggle; typing another D re-
encrypts the joke.
< Prompts for an article ID or the rest of a message
ID. It will display the article if it exists.
A Go to the article numbered count in the current
newsgroup. Regretably, no error message is
produced if the article doesn't exist. Instead
vnews starts from count and continues skanning
until it finds and article.
p Gets you the parent article (the article that the
current aricle is a followup to). This doesn't
work if the current article was posted by A new or
notesfile. To get back to from the parent
article, use the b command. Unfortunately, you
use several p commands to trace the discussion
back further, there is no command to get you back,
s Prompts you for a file name and appends the
article to the file. Depending on how the netnews
administrator set up your system, the article may
have a "From " line in front of it to allow the
file to be read using your mail program.
w Writes the article to a file without the article
header. It is equivelant to "!sed 1',?^$/d' $A >
file" but is built in to avoid trashing the
screen. It is intended primarily for saving stuff
in net.sources.
? Displays a synopsys of commands. The synopsys
will be removed from the screen when the next
command is executed. If you want to remove the
synopsys without doing anything else, use the d
command.
3. BBBBuuuuggggssss aaaannnndddd WWWWiiiisssshhhh LLLLiiiisssstttt
1. If the posting date on an article is not in ARPA
format, vnews will mangle it. This won't normally
affect you since inews converts all dates to ARPA
format, but you may encounter this bug if you use
vnews to look at old articles.
2. As with other visual interfaces, vnews does not handle
typing errors gracefully. Occasionally I hit the
enter key on my terminal, which sends the entire
- 6 -
bottom line. If the prompt is "more? ", the "r" will
be interpreted as a reply command and I can recover by
simply exiting the editor which vnews puts me into.
If the prompt is "next? ", I exit news by sending it a
quit signal (typing FS) and start all over again. I
have no real solution to this rpoblem.
3. There is some argument for always printing the first
page of the article rather than printing just the
header and forcing the user to type a return. At 9600
baud, this does not slow things down too much, and at
slower speeds this might still be better for users who
use virtterm (i. e. have interruptable screen
updates). I can't add an option to readnews without
modifying code outside visual.c, but if you want this
feature simply delete code in getnextart which sets
the HDRONLY flag.
4. There should be an "unsubscribe to followup" command
which would prevent you from seeing further followups
on a given topic. This would remember the article
title and not show you any more articles with that
title or that title preceded by "Re: ". The list of
titles would be stored in a file together with a date,
and vnews would strip entries more than say 3 weeks
old when reading in the file. Implementation of this
idea is complicated by the fact that the notesfile
system truncates titles.
5. An unsubscribe to person command is also tempting on
occasion, but that seems to violate the spirit of
USENET.