From: doom@leland.Stanford.EDU (Joseph Brenner)
Subject: Reading news the Gnu way (was inane "Survey")
Organization: DSO, Stanford University
Date: 19 Aug 92 00:04:59 GMT

>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.  You
should get a menu of newsgroups you can cursor/search around
in.  Select one by hitting a space bar.  Be prepared to wait
some more. You'll get a split screen with a menu of subject
headers above and message bodies below.  You cursor around
and select items with the space bar.  Much is intuitive, but
don't forget to try C-h m if you're confused.

(This isn't the *best* way to read news... if you can find
"nn" somewhere you should definitely try that.  I've never
used "trn", maybe it has some virtues I don't know about.
There's a newish newsreader on the Macintosh called
"Nuntius" which is also worth checking out. Newsgrazer on
the NeXT isn't awful.  All of the above are huge
improvements on "rn".)  

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

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

But the advantages of gnus:  

(1) Ideological purity.  No need to soil your consciousness
by leaving emacs.

(2) The newsgroup menu is nifty for choosing the occasional
odd newsgroup you wouldn't normally read.  This is missing
from nn.

(3) When you reply, you can see the text you're replying to
in another window.  There's no easy way to implement this if
your editor is a sub-process of your newsreader.  This
biases people toward "quoting" everything replied to, and
not everything gets deleted that should be.

(4) Gnu makes an effort to group subject headers together so
you can easily choose whether to read or skip entire
threads.  This is *the* hot meme among newsreaders at
present, and the main problem with rn.  (Nn implements it
more cleanly, though.)

(5) Works with news stored in a conventional format, and is
probably more widely available than nn, which uses special
index files for news that increase the space it takes up by
around 20%.  The nn I have access to doesn't carry
everything I can get using something like gnus.

(6) Certainly not least: you've got access to all of the
buffers and processes you've opened since you started...
text, direds, ispell, whatever.  You can develop cut & paste
skills that are useful in *all* environments, including
dialing up with a cheap PC.

Go, and Emacs be with you.