ecarroll@vax1.tcd.ie (Eddy Carroll) (11/17/89)
We are running NEWS 5.8 here (shortly to upgrade to 5.9) and for the
most part, I think it is great.
I have a suggestion though. Would it be possible to provide a way of
disabling the "smart refresh" display? I often dial up the VAX from
home, and if there is any line noise while I am reading, subsequent
screens tend to be "out of focus", in that my terminal screen isn't showing
exactly what NEWS thinks it is (the line noise causes some lines to be shifted
to the right). In such cases, it would be nice to be able to force
a complete screen redraw every time the screen is cleared, rather than
having to manually do a REFRESH (which means that most of the information
is actually being sent twice).
The other situation where such a facility would be useful is when I login
from a DecStation using xterm, which seems to output BOLD characters
in a much smaller font than the rest of the screen.
I also agree heartily with an earlier posting I read that suggested
that the newsgroups listing shows each groups priority.
Another nice feature to have would be to allow the user to specify
the format of the article display (i.e. a custom format might display
only 40 cols of article title, but include the author as well). And
commands to change the effective width and height of the viewing screen.
Even without the above though, NEWS is still a very nice package to use.
People keep telling me I should learn rn on the local Unix system,
but I haven't felt the inclination to change yet.
--
Eddy Carroll ----* Genuine MUD Wizard | "You haven't lived until
INTER: ecarroll@vax1.tcd.ie | you've died in MUD!"
UUCP: {..uunet}!mcvax!ukc!vax1.tcd.ie!ecarroll | -- Richard Bartle