Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnewsh!ho5cad!msb From: msb@ho5cad.att.com (Mike Balenger) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.gnus Subject: Re: GNUS vs. Gnews Summary: gnus beats Gnews for speed, ease-of-use, and user interface Message-ID: Date: 29 Jun 89 09:09:38 GMT References: <442@mqws2.fed.FRB.GOV> Sender: msb@cbnewsh.ATT.COM Reply-To: msb@ho5cad.att.com (Mike Balenger) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 60 In-reply-to: m1tag00@fed.frb.gov's message of 23 Jun 89 17:33:20 GMT > I use Gnews as my news reader. It works pretty well. I > especially like the indexing capability of Gnews. That's the default in gnus. > Gnews is a little sluggish at times though. Going from > one news group to another can take anywhere from 5 to 20 seconds. > When a new news group arrives it can take 30 to 60 seconds to > get the names of the new groups. Yeah, that pissed me off, too. I switched from Gnews to gnus, and was pleased with the faster response. > One feature missing from Gnews that I would really like > is a dired mode on all the news group names (an option for subscribed > groups only, or all news groups). One could move randomly through all > the news group names reading only those that interested them that day. This is what I figured you meant by dired mode. It's the default. Initially, you are presented with a list of groups, like this: 4: comp.risks 85: comp.software-eng * 1: gnu.announce 30: gnu.emacs.bug you then select a group, and get a list of subjects, like this: 111: [1430:bob@tut.cis.] GNUS 3.12 (07 of 10) 112: [1388:bob@tut.cis.] GNUS 3.12 (09 of 10) 113: [1362:bob@tut.cis.] GNUS 3.12 (08 of 10) 114: [820:bob@tut.cis.o] GNUS 3.12 (10 of 10) D 118:+[ 22:m1tag00@fed.f] GNUS vs. Gnews 119: [ 40:umerin@photon] GNUS vs. Gnews You then select (or delete) an article and read (or skip) it. Or follow-up, or save as mail, or save as a file, or reply, or patch, or ... You bounce between selecting groups in newsgroup-mode, and selecting articles in subject-mode. (I probably didn't get the names right, but that's the idea.) This (dired/index) interface has allowed me to read/weed articles much more efficiently. With Gnews, I had to see the article before I realized I didn't want to read it, and I had to be in a newsgroup before I realized that it was (was not) important. As you mentioned, this could take 5-30 seconds. Quite an investment only to discover that you're not interested in the info that was returned. There was no easy way to get a big picture of the group/article organization and pick out the high priority items. With gnus, I CAN get this picture, and get much more info for a smaller investment in time. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael S. Balenger (201) 949-8789 AT&T Bell Labs Room 1L-405 msb@ho5cad.att.com Crawfords Corner Road att!ho5cad!msb Holmdel, NJ 07733