rock%warp@Sun.COM (Bill Petro - GSG Marketing) (07/07/89)
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: >In article <4827@freja.diku.dk> seindal@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Rene' Seindal) writes: >>Second, the discussion on the net and on the nn-info mailinglist has (in my >>eyes) revealed two major problems with nn. The first is the `Re^n' problem, >>and I know Kim will change this if he is told often enough. The second >>problem is the way nn marks articles as read. The current scheme is clearly >>not sufficient, and it will have to be changed, so nn has at least facilities >>comparable to rn's. Kim is well aware of this, and are working on it. >Great. For me, the primary deficiency of nn is the lack of an >equivalent to rn's 'M' command -- the ability to flag certain articles >so they'll hang around and I can deal with them later -- and the ability >to stop halfway through a group, go read something else, and pick up where >I left off. To convert the majority of rn users, nn will need to provide >this capability. The news etiquette documents request that people >read all articles in a group before following up, to avoid duplicating >other people's words. rn's 'M' command makes this easy. I have been quite impressed with nn. I agree that the only real deficiency is not being able to stop reading at a point in the newsgroup and pick it up later. There is the "l" command that will enable you to temporarily "mark" or leave an article (and return to it later) for the expressed purpose of checking other articles withe same subject before responding. I was hoping that the ":unread" command would help out with this "deficiency": :unread [ group ] [ articles ] Mark the current (or specified) group as unread. If the articles argument is omitted, the number of unread articles in the group will be set to the number of unread articles when nn was invoked. Otherwise, the argument specifies the number of unread articles. However, how does one know the number of articles one has not read, since they are sorted by subject (by default) and not article number? I imagine the user could resort by age or arrival and then count by hand, but it seems to me that the program probably is tracking the article number somewhere. The program could then update the rc file with this number as the last number read. This still might not be satisfactory however, as most users progress through a newsgroup by subject (rather than article number, as rn does) and the article you just read might be the third one in (sorted by subject) but the last article (sorted by article number) thereby losing articles you really want to yet look at. Bill Petro - Sun Microsystems, GSG Marketing {decwrl,hplabs,ucbvax}!sun!warp!rock Bill Petro
chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (07/07/89)
>>For those of you, that do not know, there is an nn-info mailinglist. Send >>requests to join to nn-info-request@dkuug.dk, and submissions to >>nn-info@dkuug.dk. As always, if you have problems or find bugs, send a >>message to nn-bugs@dkuug.dk. >If this list gets big, I suggest that a single US distribution point >be set up to save money (no, I'm not volunteering). Actually, from the looks of it, nn might end up deserving its own newsgroup... Chuq Von Rospach =|= Editor,OtherRealms =|= Member SFWA/ASFA chuq@apple.com =|= CI$: 73317,635 =|= AppleLink: CHUQ [This is myself speaking. No company can control my thoughts.] You are false data. Therefore I shall ignore you.
seindal@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Rene' Seindal) (07/07/89)
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: > If this list gets big, I suggest that a single US distribution point > be set up to save money (no, I'm not volunteering). It is fairly small right now, but money is not a problem, since dkuug.dk (the danish EUnet backbone) is on the Internet. Rene' Seindal (seindal@diku.dk).
jbayer@ispi.UUCP (Jonathan Bayer) (07/07/89)
jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: }>For those of you, that do not know, there is an nn-info mailinglist. Send }>requests to join to nn-info-request@dkuug.dk, and submissions to }>nn-info@dkuug.dk. As always, if you have problems or find bugs, send a }>message to nn-bugs@dkuug.dk. }If this list gets big, I suggest that a single US distribution point }be set up to save money (no, I'm not volunteering). UUNET might be a good place to do the master distribution for the US. JB -- Jonathan Bayer Beware: The light at the end of the Intelligent Software Products, Inc. tunnel may be an oncoming dragon 500 Oakwood Ave. ...uunet!ispi!root Roselle Park, NJ 07204 (201) 245-5922 jbayer@ispi.UUCP
todd@ivucsb.sba.ca.us (Todd Day) (07/08/89)
syd@DSI.COM (Syd Weinstein) writes:
~I also miss the 'header' mode (or v mode) of rn,when I want to check out
~a message.
Use 'h' while reading the message.
--
Todd Day | todd@ivucsb.sba.ca.us | ivucsb!todd@anise.acc.com
"Santa Barbara - so many babes... so few who will talk to me."jeff@cjsa.WA.COM (Jeffery Small) (07/09/89)
seindal@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Rene' Seindal) writes: >On the other hand, a command to move to the next group, leaving all articles >in the current group unread, should not be necessary, as it can be done with >`~@N' (cancel all selections, reverse all selections (effectively selecting >everything), and move to the next group, leaving selected articles unread). Actually, the above command sequence '~@` will unfortunately NOT do what Rene' describes, if (and only if) you have more articles than will appear on one screen-menu-page. The reason is that '~' maps to the unselect-all command which works across the entire newsgroup and multiple menu-pages while '@' maps to select-invert which only selects on the displayed menu page - not on subsequent menu-pages. I tried to implement a "select-all" macro as: define 1 unselect-all select-invert continue end This worked great until I got to a multi-page menu of articles. When I used this macro, all the articles on menu page 1 were selected and the "continue" in the macro moved on to the next menu-page. Now however, when you issue macro #1 again to select all of these articles, the "unselect-all" will unselect all of your previous selections on menu-page 1! Unfortunately, you won't see any signs of this until you begin reading and wonder where all the articles went. I can see no way to accurately implement a "select-all" feature using the current set of commands and would suggest that adding a builtin "select-all" command to NN is both necessary and desirable. On another issue, I have seen a number of complaints about menu-level commands being difficult to use because they are all in uppercase. In my init file, I have added map definitions for a block of six function keys on my keyboard to perform various tasks in both "menu" and "show" modes. I find that I can now do 95% of all my news reading using just two fingers and a thumb. While I parse the news, my hand rarely move from its resting position. The macro and mapping features of NN are so powerful that I find it hard to believe that anyone couldn't produce a extremely comfortable layout for themselves. If you haven't tried using these features, do it. A few minutes experimenting and setting things up can really improve the performance of NN. I only wish that all of my programs offered this level of flexibility. Very nice job Kim. -- Jeffery Small (206) 485-5596 uw-beaver!uw-nsr!uw-warp C. Jeffery Small and Associates !cjsa!jeff 19112 152nd Ave NE - Woodinville, WA 98072 uunet!nwnexus
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (07/09/89)
I still haven't got the complete NN distribution, but it seems that I'm not going to be using it. I typically leave multiple articles unread, often for days. Any newsreader that doesn't track, in non-volatile storage, each and every article that I have read is unusable. That sort of restriction is only found on BBSes. Really, all I want is an enhancement to vnews to make 'L' interactive. -- Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Business: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. | "WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL Personal: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com. `-_-' | THE WOMEN IN TEXAS?" Quote: Have you hugged your wolf today? 'U` | -- ACS1W@jane.uh.edu (meesh)
bernd@actisb.UUCP (Bernd-Gunter Nitzler) (07/31/89)
brent@capmkt.COM (Brent Chapman) writes: >It's important because "rn" isn't the only thing that expects a .newsrc file. >The example that springs immediately to mind (and I'm sure there are others) >is the "arbitron" program that gathers the data used to calculate the various >USENET readership and propogation statistics. Arbitron works by reading the >.newsrc file of all the users on the system. If they're using nn, they don't >have a .newsrc (or they have one that hasn't been touched in a while, if they >used to use rn), and thus don't get counted in the survey. If someone is interrested in a special version of "arbitron" which also scans the .nn/rc files then I can mail one. Friday I mailed one version to reid@decwrl but it bounced and I'll try it today again. -- Bernd-Gunter Nitzler VoiceNet: 49 / (30) 8 84 44-224 ACTIS in Berlin GmbH UUCP from USA: pyramid\ Kurfuerstendamm 65 from elsewhere: mcvax!unido!tub!actisb!bernd D-1000 Berlin 15, W. Germany