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Re: Standard way to use Gnus?


From: Non Gnuser
Subject: Re: Standard way to use Gnus?
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 18:40:42 +0000 (UTC)

On 2015-03-19, Bud Frede <frede@mouse-potato.com> wrote:
> David Masterson <dsmasterson@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I'm sure everyone has there own preferences on how to use Gnus -- that's
>> the essense of Emacs, after all.  However, it's always instructive to
>> learn from others and find new methods of using such a powerful tool.
>> I've been around Emacs & Gnus for more 30 years (yes, I believe I used
>> GNUS when it was written for TECO/Emacs), but I was never an expert in
>> its usage.  I still tend to just basically C-n & Space through the
>> Summary buffer to read what I'm interested in and never really sat down
>> to figure out the more advanced tools in Gnus.

Likewise.

> I've used a number of other newsreaders over the years, and I think that
> has been helping me to learn Gnus.

Which ones have you used? I have used slrn for years now. Before that I
tried tin, Thunderbird, another few console ones (trn?) and a gui one I
can't remember the name of. I hated them all for various reasons. tin was
hard to configure and seemed to want to announce to the world it was tin.
Not sure if you can stop gnus from doing this, I see it in your post headers
too, and wasn't that flexible.  Thunderbird is badly bugridden and the
filtering didn't work that well and it was hard to get it to work with more
than one news server. The gui one was actually ok but I hate gui apps so I
must have blocked it out of my memory.

> I start looking into whether Gnus can offer a similar feature to one I'm
> used to in another newsreader. I then figure out how to do it, and often
> find that Gnus is more flexible than the others. While I'm searching
> around and poking through the docs, I almost always run across some other
> Gnus feature that I want to try too.

What I like about slrn is it's extremely fast and the scoring (killfiling)
is extremely powerful. It's a console app so it's easy to set up window
manager shortcuts to start it up pointed at different news servers 
and have multiple instances open at the same time, all connected to a
different news server. It's easy to pipe articles to other applications for
pre/post processing. The colors are customizable. slrn did have a huge
learning curve to get it the way I want. Now that I've done that over a long
period I'm too lazy to get gnus set up properly. I have used it from time to
time and it's neat because I have Emacs open all the time editing code and
for composing an email or letter or whatever it doesn't get any better than
Emacs for most text. Having that power available in gnus trumps newsreaders
that don't let you use an external editor. slrn does so I get all that.

> I don't know whether it would be productive for you to try another
> newsreader or not. The only other thing I can think of is to check
> through the newsgroups and see what parts of Gnus other people are
> discussing. This newsgroup is probably the best for that, but there
> might be something worthwhile in news.software.readers as well.

Unfortunately the noise level in n.s.r can be quite high at times and there
are several certified netkooks there. This ng is a lot better but also a lot
less active.

> Oh, I thought of something else! Do you ever run across any of those
> "which newsreader do you recommend?" threads in other newsgroups? Check
> and see what people recommend and why, and see if you can come up with
> why Gnus should be recommended and how it compares with the others. I
> don't know if you'll want to actually post your recommendation at this
> point, but just going through the exercise of composing it could be
> helpful.

I think if I spent more time with gnus I could get it to do most of the
things I want but I don't know how good the killfiling is and I don't know
whether it can easily work with multiple news servers (and stop advertising
itself!)



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