From: hullw@essex.ac.uk (Hulley W J)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs
Subject: Re: Reading news the Gnu way (was inane "Survey")
Date: 20 Aug 92 10:55:26 GMT
	<TROST.92Aug18122441@romulus.reed.edu>
	<1992Aug18.201906.15101@afit.af.mil>
	<doom.714182699@elaine36.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, UK.
In-reply-to: doom@leland.Stanford.EDU's message of 19 Aug 92 00:04:59 GMT


Joseph Brenner  (doom@leland.Stanford.EDU)  writes:
> >Alex Kilpatrick  fkilpatr@afit.af.mil says:
> 
> >Wow, I use emacs, too.  I am *almost* in heaven, because I
> >use it for everything but reading news.  How do you do
> >that?
> 
> Try ESC x gnus.  Be prepared to wait for a while.

  I used to use Gnus on a Sun 3/60 and it was a tad underpowered...
but all is well now using it on a Solbourne 5E-905 <grin>, you just
need the right machine to run Emacs on, for ~260 groups (judicious use
of C-k) Gnus starts up in 21 secsonds, including the time to start up
Emacs.

> (This isn't the *best* way to read news... if you can find

Oh yes it is!

> One of the worst things about Gnu gnus (pronounced Gah-new
> news) is that it's slow, and still worse is the way in which
> it's slow.  It can take five minutes to start up, but
> instead of doing it in the background while you go off and
> do something else, it seizes the mini-buffer and chatters
> incessantly about what it's doing.  You almost need a
> workstation with a GUI so you can put it in a window by

  This is what 'screen' is for (current version 3.2), you can even
leave gnus sitting in the background and 'detatch' from screen to
return later.

> itself while it paralyzes things.  In my opinion this is
> deeply un-Gnu behavior (and maybe un-unix to boot).

  Its very Gnuish behaviour, Gnus is bloated and featureful, it was
written in the spirit of Gnu echo :-)

> There are some other minor problems.  Subscribing to new
> newsgroups seems to be a broken feature... I have to edit
> the .newsrc directly and then do an ESC R to force gnus to

  Sounds like you have a broken/old version of Gnus, go get 3.14.1 and
get the speedup functions too :

  ;; LCD Archive Entry:
  ;; gnus-speedups|Felix Lee|flee@cs.psu.edu|
  ;; Simple performance enhancements for GNUS|
  ;; 92-05-27|1.4|~/misc/gnus-speedups.Z|

  New groups are automagically prepended to the newsgroups list, ready
for the C-k key.  If you want to re-subscribe to a group press the L
key to see the full listing of groups (lowercase l to go back) or use
the U key to put a killed group back in the .newsrc .

> read it again.  And the Subject display seems kind of sloppy
> and confusing to me.

  I believe they call this threading.

> Go, and Emacs be with you. 

               Be proud, brandish your shining sword of 
                 Emacs against the foe of the Vee eye.

  John.

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