tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) (01/02/91)
From the keyboard of ed@dah.de.intel.com:
:I also had a lot of trouble getting trn to run, and (between core dumps)
:I didn't really like the interface much. I don't understand all the fuss
:over trn. I find that nn is much more robust and if I'm not mistaken
:also follows "threads". Would someone who has used both like to comment?
:Are nn and trn comparable in features? Am I missing out on something
:trn does that nn doesn't do?
As I understand it, all nn does is present articles sorted by subject
and date. This is a far cry from what trn does, which is to construct
an article tree based on Reference lines and message IDs. This means
that you can:
easily move to the real parent or first ancestor of an article
kill off just the followups to a particular article
follow threads across subject changes (like this one)
know in advance whether there are followups to an article
This is all because relationships aren't based on dates and subjects,
but rather on references and message-ids. This makes all the difference
in the world to me, and I would never go back.
Another thing you can do with (t)rn that I don't believe can be done
with nn is to autokill a subject but to then unkill by author. That
way even if you've killed subject "Happy Holidays", you would unkill
postings on that subject if there were from, say Dennis Ritchie or
your CEO. The truth is I don't use kill files at all as much anymore
with trn as I did with rn because the thread selection menus make
these less needed. I read 3 times the newsgroups, and one-third
of the articles, with trn compared with rn.
When I tried nn, it dumped core a lot; trn hasn't done that to me.
nn is also quite a significant change from rn, and I was a power rn
user with all kinds of macros already set up and the various %-escapes
pretty much memorized, so I didn't care for how different nn was:
I wasn't able to leverage off previous knowledge.
--tom
--
Tom Christiansen tchrist@convex.com convex!tchrist
"With a kernel dive, all things are possible, but it sure makes it hard
to look at yourself in the mirror the next morning." -me