discolo@ucsbcsl.UUCP (Anthony V. Discolo) (05/03/85)
A new version of readnews had been posted in net.sources. I
think it has most of the useful features of the old one.
What the new version of readnews gives you is a way to quickly
scan the articles to determine which ones you want to read.
This is done by grouping the articles of a single newsgroup
together with author and subject, and also being able to preview
the article. I think the previewing feature is a very
nice one, and will help you weed out uninteresting articles.
If there are more articles than can fit on a screen, then the
articles are split into multiple screens, and you are able to
go back and forth between them, selecting the articles you
want to read. Articles are gathered one screen at a time,
so even reading a newsgroup from the beginning does not take
a long initialization period. This is the first phase.
After you have selected the articles you want to read, you
signal the program by a command, and it goes into the second
phase of reading news, which presents the articles that you've
selected through a news paginator. After you read each article,
you can save it, reply or followup, etc., just like the old readnews.
You can go back and forth between the two phases for any
newsgroup; you can go back and forth between newsgroups. If
you have already read an article, and are displaying the articles
a second time, you will see which articles have been previously
read.
This has been developed and tested on a 4.2BSD system for most
terminals that we have (Wyse, BitGraph, Z19, Freedom). It uses
only the termlib library, so it shouldn't be too hard to transfer
over to another flavor of UNIX.
Have fun!!! I know it has saved many people here a lot of time
reading news.
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