del@dataio.UUCP (Erik Lindberg) (09/18/84)
< nonononono please, please leave a line for me > - Yes, yes, a lot of us have tried to use the bulletin board package under Emacs, with no result. You will also have trouble if you try to use the ftp-visit package to edit a file on a remote machine. Both of these packages are very specific to CMU. I am working on packages to perform these functions, as I need to administer files on several machines on one count, and am always behind in my reading on the other. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you are interested, read on. I will mail this stuff to anyone interested, and will send an update when I get the rest of the features implemented. NOTE: use the return address at the end of this article, as the one in the mail header is *VERY* unreliable. First, bboards package. I am not sure what the original purpose was, but I assume that WE all want to use it on Usenet. I have written a package from the ground up that is compatible with readnews. That means that you can arbitrarily switch back and forth between readnews and my Emacs package since it maintains .newsrc in compatible fashion, and accesses it for lists of unread articles and subscription groups. The package comes up and displays a list of news groups you are suscribed to in a directory fashion. You can suscribe to a new group or unsuscribe to a group from this page, or you can check that group for unread articles. If there are unread articles, a new window is brought up with all unread article titles in that newsgroup (there is an "x" option too). Now you just page down the screen till you see a title that looks interesting and type "y" to read that article. A "y" for each of the few articles you want to read sure beats an "n" for all of those you don't!!! Not to mention paging through all that header garbage. You can, of course, un-read an article if you want to save it. You can also "page" through the directory, marking groups of 12 articles at a time as "read", or hit "*" to trash all the articles in that group. Finally you can exit with, or without, updating the .newsrc file. If the package was invoked as "emacs -lreadnews -enews" it will exit to the shell when you are done with the news. Problems: - Only the titles of the articles are displayed in the newsgroup directory of unread articles, so if you like to look for articles by a particular author, tough. - Suscribing to a new group does not take effect until the next time you invoke the package, meaning you must exit and then restart. Unsuscribing is instantaneous ( system load level < 5 :-) - Until I get around to writing a C program to do the file activity in /usr/spool/news there can be a delay of up to 20 seconds to display the directory of a particular news group, iff there are > 50 or so unread articles. Otherwise it is pretty fast. "No news" message comes back in about 3 seconds if you already read them all, or if there are only a few articles: about the same. I DO plan to fix this up, since I am VERY impatient. - There is currently no provision for posting a followup article. This is mostly because I am afraid of offending a news-site somewhere if I get the headers messed up. This is also on the MUST-DO list though. - The only way to reply by mail to an article is to recursively edit the article, then invoke "smail" on it. As you can see, it is still only partly functional, but is quite a time saver for me, even as it stands. It has already paid back the developement time I've put into it. Let me know about interest, it will affect features and time frame for completion of this guy. Also, if enough people are interested, I'll post to net.sources. Coming up: - *normal* (easily configurable) ftp-visit for your LAN. - *super* EDT emulator/enhancer for ex-Vmess users. Almost just like 'home', but as user gets familiar has all the features of Emacs plus some added ones. I modified most of the utility packages for consistant use of the vt100 style keypad from mode to mode. There have been some similar postings in the past, but they don't really act much like EDT, when you get down to serious usage. - Some patches, to make things work a little better with termcap entries. Did you know that Emacs tries to use it's own terminal drivers, and isn't happy if it *has* to use termcap? Erik Lindberg AKA del ...!ucbvax!lbl-unix!uw-beaver!teltone!dataio!del ( I used to call myself a hacker.... )