[luv-main] NNTP client recommendations
What is the newsreader equivalent of mutt? Rationale: I use NNTP for gwene, gmane and asr. I'm sick of Gnus. I'm not sick of NNTP -- (esp. not interested in RSS clients). Years ago, happily migrated mail from gnus to mutt. So, something like mutt for NNTP is what I want. PS: I notice mutt's debian/patches/ contains some NNTP patches that just need rebasing, maybe that's less icky than learning foorn...
Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
What is the newsreader equivalent of mutt?
Rationale:
I use NNTP for gwene, gmane and asr. I'm sick of Gnus. I'm not sick of NNTP -- (esp. not interested in RSS clients). Years ago, happily migrated mail from gnus to mutt. So, something like mutt for NNTP is what I want.
I suppose you could try tin or trn4. There are unofficial patches that add NNTP support to Mutt.
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
What is the newsreader equivalent of mutt?
Some would argue slrn. I personally would say tin.[1] Back in the Internet Pleistocene (1980s, 1990s), I used tin and really liked it, but its lack of maintenance (by late 1990s) started to become a problem, e.g., v. 1.2.x choked on long headers often encountered when someone crossposted to Basingstoke and back. Looking into the reasons for lack of maintenance I noticed it had (at the time) some sort of proprietary licence, so somewhat unhappily switcheched to slrn -- bit it never really grabbed me. Serendipitously, a few years later, I noticed that tin had been updated and changed over to BSD licenseing, and so switched back. [1] Truly old-school choice include rn, trn. However, I find tin's better threading, richer terminal support, and more-intuitive-to-me command set to make it win.
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
FWIW I've rejected trn/trn4 because Debian puts it in non-free, and I'd rather not enable non-free.
Yeah, you see, I never even noticed that, because the last time I even looked at trn was around 1994 and I was running Slackware. Back then, most of us hadn't yet learned to be wary of licensing problems. trn's licensing (now that I bother to look at it) is one of those 'gratis for non-commercial use only' licences that were common among source-available packages in the 1980s/1990s. Debian's licensing notes include this: The author of trn, Wayne Davison, has expressed a desire to eventually relicense it under the BSD licence (minus the advertising clause). Unfortunately, this will have to wait until certain old code from other sources is removed.
On 17/11/11 14:46, Rick Moen wrote:
trn's licensing (now that I bother to look at it) is one of those 'gratis for non-commercial use only' licences that were common among source-available packages in the 1980s/1990s.
That's a real shame, it was my newsreader of choice in the early '90's (1.0 was posted in August 1990).. -- Chris Samuel : http://www.csamuel.org/ : Melbourne, VIC
At 01:58 PM 11/17/2011, Rick Moen wrote:
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
What is the newsreader equivalent of mutt?
Some would argue slrn. I personally would say tin.[1]
I used to be a fan of tin as well. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
Rick Moen wrote:
Some would argue slrn. I personally would say tin.[1]
OK, first serious problem: tin expects long threads with text/plain articles. gwene.net.lwn.headlines.newrss, for example, has single-article threads that each contain only a text/html attachment, so it looks like this: Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:19:50 gwene.net.lwn.headlines.newrss Thread 1344 of 1344 Lines 6 [$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 17, 2011 No responses corbet <post@gwene.org> Newsgroups: gwene.net.lwn.headlines.newrss [-- text/html, encoding 8bit, charset: utf-8, 6 lines --] <n>=set current to n; <TAB>=next unread; /=search pattern; ^K=kill/select a=author search; B=body search; c=catchup; f=followup; K=mark read |=pipe; m=mail; o=print; q=quit; r=reply mail; s=save; t=tag; w=post -- Last response -- Gnus automagically shoved the text/html part through emacs-w3m. I don't suppose I can tell tin to do likewise for w3m? I can't see the equivalent of mutt's "v" to get to the attachment. Even if I find that I forsee that being a pain in the arse, because I'm used to just hitting space to go to the next unread article (if necessary, by going to the next unread thread or group first) -- tin seems to want me to do a lot of q's and ^M's, at least by default. Stupid RSS... I think this is enough of a showstopper that I'm going to need to stick with a newsreader that's hooked into a browser, so that I can follow all the <a href="useful url">this</a> tags that literally say "this" rather than something useful. Unless someone has already a working tinrc that just DTRT with w3m/lynx -dump and urlview or something? PS: the gmane (mailing list) bridge is considerably more sane PPS: on the plus side, tin tells me *up front* when a list is one-way, whereas gnus waits until after I've written the bloody reply.
Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Gnus automagically shoved the text/html part through emacs-w3m. I don't suppose I can tell tin to do likewise for w3m? I can't see the equivalent of mutt's "v" to get to the attachment.
Even if I find that I forsee that being a pain in the arse, because I'm used to just hitting space to go to the next unread article (if necessary, by going to the next unread thread or group first) -- tin seems to want me to do a lot of q's and ^M's, at least by default.
I know you ruled out RSS readers earlier in the thread, so maybe I shouldn't suggest this, but... Have you tried newsbeuter?
On 2011-11-17 18:11, Jason White wrote:
Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
Gnus automagically shoved the text/html part through emacs-w3m. I don't suppose I can tell tin to do likewise for w3m? I can't see the equivalent of mutt's "v" to get to the attachment.
Even if I find that I forsee that being a pain in the arse, because I'm used to just hitting space to go to the next unread article (if necessary, by going to the next unread thread or group first) -- tin seems to want me to do a lot of q's and ^M's, at least by default.
I know you ruled out RSS readers earlier in the thread, so maybe I shouldn't suggest this, but... Have you tried newsbeuter?
I personally tried newsbeuter for about 10 minutes before deciding it was pathetic. It *looks* a lot like Mutt, so much so that you can't tell the difference at first glance, but as soon as you, for example, try to search through the threads or limit the view with a search string, you find that it really isn't *anything* like Mutt at all. -- Regards, Matthew Cengia
Matthew Cengia <mattcen@gmail.com> wrote:
I personally tried newsbeuter for about 10 minutes before deciding it was pathetic. It *looks* a lot like Mutt, so much so that you can't tell the difference at first glance, but as soon as you, for example, try to search through the threads or limit the view with a search string, you find that it really isn't *anything* like Mutt at all.
After a quick check of the manual, I was able to limit the article view with a search string: Type F to enter a filter, then give the following expression: title =~ "search string" I tested it with the lwn.net feed, title =~ "kernel" matched everything with "kernel" in the title. There are quite a few operators listed in the documentation.
On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Trent W. Buck wrote:
What is the newsreader equivalent of mutt?
Rationale:
I use NNTP for gwene, gmane and asr. I'm sick of Gnus. I'm not sick of NNTP -- (esp. not interested in RSS clients). Years ago, happily migrated mail from gnus to mutt. So, something like mutt for NNTP is what I want.
PS: I notice mutt's debian/patches/ contains some NNTP patches that just need rebasing, maybe that's less icky than learning foorn...
slrn is pretty mutt like, not that I ever really used mutt all that much (I tried, but my fingers are too used to pine). And as an added bonus, according to debian unstable, it's almost up to version 1.0. It's been at 0.999... for infinity years now. -- Tim Connors
Tim Connors <tconnors@rather.puzzling.org> wrote:
slrn is pretty mutt like, not that I ever really used mutt all that much (I tried, but my fingers are too used to pine).
And as an added bonus, according to debian unstable, it's almost up to version 1.0. It's been at 0.999... for infinity years now.
It also lacks support for MIME messages, which puts it out of contention for me. That's very early 1990s indeed and I'm not going back there.
On 17.11.11 12:38, Trent W. Buck wrote:
So, something like mutt for NNTP is what I want.
PS: I notice mutt's debian/patches/ contains some NNTP patches that just need rebasing, maybe that's less icky than learning foorn...
That has enormous appeal, if the patches are current. (Especially since I had trouble with slrn. It wouldn't progress past the first 10 posts on a list.) The patched debian package at http://www.llucax.com.ar/proj/mutt-nntp-debian/ is satisfactorily current - the mutt 1.5.21 is newer than my current one. Now, adding a debian repository to /etc/apt/sources.list is a no-no on a ubuntu box IIRC, but can I get away with installing one package, I wonder? A single interface for two slightly different internet protocols, which essentially do the same thing, seems ideal, if there's not too much pain implicit in the description: "It is not meant to make mutt into a newsreader, but allow you to treat newsgroups the same as your mailboxes.", at http://www.fiction.net/blong/programs/mutt/ Erik -- "A friend had given me this EPIRB in Chile and the expiry date on the battery was actually 2002, so you know there was no guarantee it was going to work." - Paul Lim, a 62-year-old Canadian solo mariner, rescued in August 2011. (http://abc.com.au/news/2011-08-02/yachtsman-rescued-in-southern-ocean/282036...)
participants (8)
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Chris Samuel -
Erik Christiansen -
Jason White -
Matthew Cengia -
Rick Moen -
Tim Connors -
Tony Langdon -
Trent W. Buck