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From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: NEWS READER FOR X??
Message-ID: <8130@think.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 5-Sep-87 00:17:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: think.8130
Posted: Sat Sep  5 00:17:05 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 22:53:25 EDT
References: <204@titn.TITN>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@godot.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 30
Keywords: x news reader

In article <204@titn.TITN> jordan@titn.TITN (Jordan Bortz) writes:
>For instance, having the subjects listed down the screen, and then
>being able to mouse through the list and select the one you want
>is better than having to sequentially N key  through all the articles
>sequentially.  This is the case even with vnews.
>
>You could have reverse video for unread messages, and a special icon next 
>to it if the article has been saved someplace.

Someone wrote something like this for Symbolics Lisp Machines, not X.
I tried it a couple of times, and found it quite cumbersome compared
to rn (not to mention it was buggy, as it seemed to be incompletely
converted to the new Symbolics release).  It listed all the newsgroups
and the number of unread articles.  When you clicked on a newsgroup it
would list the author and subject of all the unread articles, and you
could then click on the articles you wanted to read.  There were some
keyboard commands to go sequentially through the articles; however, if
you wanted to read all the articles on a particular subject (a la rn's
^N) you had to manually click.

In conclusion, I wouldn't use a window-based news reader unless it
were as easy to use as rn.


---
Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
seismo!think!barmar