Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!convex!tchrist@convex.UUCP
From: tchrist@convex.UUCP (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: vn verses vnews
Message-ID: <654@convex.UUCP>
Date: 17 Oct 88 11:36:48 GMT
References: <632@convex.UUCP> <2743@uvacs.cs.Virginia.EDU> <2486@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <4866@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us> <4369@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Sender: news@convex.UUCP
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.UUCP (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Technical Support Center, Richardson, TX
Lines: 36

In article <4369@bsu-cs.UUCP> neubauer@bsu-cs.UUCP (Paul Neubauer) writes:
>In article <4866@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us> zeeff@b-tech.UUCP (Jon Zeeff) writes:
>While we're on the subject of features or misfeatures of rn, the one that
>has always bugged me is the difficulty involved in seeing articles that you
>have ALREADY read.  I have used the 'h' and have RTFM, but I always seem to
>find myself editing the .newsrc file.  If there are UNread articles
>remaining in the newsgroup, I can simply type in numbers to get previously
>read articles (though I often have to do some guessing because I cannot
>always remember the number of the article that I so rashly allowed to be
>marked as read).  However, if I happened to hit 'j' on the LAST article of a
>newsgroup that I had been flipping through, I am left at the 'End of
>newsgroup foo, what now?' prompt and seem to have no access to any of the
>preceding articles unless I quit and edit the .newsrc.

This is really RTFM, but it's one of the most common compaints I get.  I
point to the manual, show them how they should have figured it out, and
they give me an incredulous, "You honestly expect me to have understood
that garbledy-gook?"  to which I reply, "Sure, why not?" and off they
storm, growling under their breath about illegible documenation.

Anyway, try this...

If you have just typed 'j' on the last article, say 880, you can see
previous ones with something like "845-$=".  You can mark everything
in a given subject unread with "?subject?rm". Remember you can 
get out the current subject with <ESC>s or %s.  There are lots of
other clever things to do, like just using = for headers or checking
for the REAL parent (by reference number), but they're all in the manual
so I won't repeat them here.

--tom

    Tom Christiansen              {uiucdcs,ut-sally,sun}!convex!tchrist 
    Convex Computer Corporation                     tchrist@convex.COM
	UNIX Support, Training, and System Administration
	    "That's not a bug -- it's a feature!"