Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!thebes!quick!cjsa!jeff From: jeff@cjsa.WA.COM (Jeffery Small) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re^2: Review of NN, a Usenet news reader Keywords: rn, .newsrc, b&d Message-ID: <1050@cjsa.WA.COM> Date: 8 Jul 89 18:24:49 GMT References: <1836@papaya.bbn.com> <1150@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk> <4827@freja.diku.dk> <3364@epimass.EPI.COM> <114069@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <4830@freja.diku.dk> Organization: C. Jeffery Small and Associates - Woodinville, WA Lines: 51 seindal@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Rene' Seindal) writes: >On the other hand, a command to move to the next group, leaving all articles >in the current group unread, should not be necessary, as it can be done with >`~@N' (cancel all selections, reverse all selections (effectively selecting >everything), and move to the next group, leaving selected articles unread). Actually, the above command sequence '~@` will unfortunately NOT do what Rene' describes, if (and only if) you have more articles than will appear on one screen-menu-page. The reason is that '~' maps to the unselect-all command which works across the entire newsgroup and multiple menu-pages while '@' maps to select-invert which only selects on the displayed menu page - not on subsequent menu-pages. I tried to implement a "select-all" macro as: define 1 unselect-all select-invert continue end This worked great until I got to a multi-page menu of articles. When I used this macro, all the articles on menu page 1 were selected and the "continue" in the macro moved on to the next menu-page. Now however, when you issue macro #1 again to select all of these articles, the "unselect-all" will unselect all of your previous selections on menu-page 1! Unfortunately, you won't see any signs of this until you begin reading and wonder where all the articles went. I can see no way to accurately implement a "select-all" feature using the current set of commands and would suggest that adding a builtin "select-all" command to NN is both necessary and desirable. On another issue, I have seen a number of complaints about menu-level commands being difficult to use because they are all in uppercase. In my init file, I have added map definitions for a block of six function keys on my keyboard to perform various tasks in both "menu" and "show" modes. I find that I can now do 95% of all my news reading using just two fingers and a thumb. While I parse the news, my hand rarely move from its resting position. The macro and mapping features of NN are so powerful that I find it hard to believe that anyone couldn't produce a extremely comfortable layout for themselves. If you haven't tried using these features, do it. A few minutes experimenting and setting things up can really improve the performance of NN. I only wish that all of my programs offered this level of flexibility. Very nice job Kim. -- Jeffery Small (206) 485-5596 uw-beaver!uw-nsr!uw-warp C. Jeffery Small and Associates !cjsa!jeff 19112 152nd Ave NE - Woodinville, WA 98072 uunet!nwnexus