ka@spanky.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) (11/01/83)
Two features planned for release 2.11 of readnews are 1) grouping articles
by discussion within a newsgroup. (Articles within a discussion are to be
sorted by posting date.), and 2) An 'a' command to show the headers of all
the articles. Adapting the first feature to vnews poses no problems, but
the second requires some thought.
One reason for providing a list of articles (are there others?) is to make
it easier to skip over unwanted articles and to find interesting ones. If
you are interested in few of the articles in a given newsgroup it is probably
a lot easier to pick the interesting articles out of a list than to type 'n'
to a large number of articles.
The simplest approach to would be to provide an a command which would replace
the article display with an index. The display might look like:
D 1 This is the first article title ka@spanky.UUCP
> 2 This is the current article jgy@hojoc.UUCP
3 Flaming watchbands, Batman! trc@houti.UUCP
The 'D' indicated articles that have been read and the '>' marks the cur-
rent article. Presumably the 'a' command would bring up the index. Vnews
commands like 'n' would function normally. Typing 'a' would remove the
index from the screen and display the current article.
This approach may be fine at 9600 baud. At slower speeds, however, I expect
the time required to display the index after reading an article would be too
long for good results. Therefore I would have the 'a' command split the
screen and place the index in one window and the current article in the
other. Another 'a' command would delete the index window. The index
would scroll automaticly when a command like 'n' set the current article
to be an article that didn't appear in the index page.
There are problems with this approach as well. If commands that change the
current article have to read in a new article, then they will be slow. Thus
hitting 'n' three times quickly to zap the next three articles will not work
well. This problem could be partially solved by allowing the command "3n"
to delete the next three articles. Furthermore, it would not be possible
to apply the vnews article scrolling commands to the index.
Comments and suggestions would be appreciated.
Kenneth Almquist