Subject: help me: basic questions

From: [email-masked] (nefarious hoyden)
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 1994 11:44:51 -0600

Hello o pine experts,

These are rudimentary questions, but i would appreciate your input:

is there an easy way to transfer an entire mail folder onto a disk or hard
drive?

*and*

how do i access the newsgroups through pine?  do you prefer it to nn?

++++post or reply to [email-masked]....not THIS address.++++

thanks!

-- 
blue, green, and d minor
the nefarious hoyden

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Dec 1994 19:42:00 GMT

[email-masked] (nefarious hoyden) writes:
>do you prefer it to nn?

For new users I think Pine is a great way to get started 
participating in news.  But if you read and participate in 
a lot of newsgroups then you'll probably want to move on
to a newsreader like nn.  Here are some features that nn has 
that Pine doesn't have:

* consolidated menu i.e., lists each subject only once on menu
* can choose multiple subjects and then go into reading mode
  and read all the articles you've selected
* can kill a subject or an author
* can have a subject auto-selected
* nn's philosophy is "no news is good news" and so when you
  move to another newsgroup it automatically marks the current
  newsgroup as read.  (You can change this behaviour if you don't
  like it; also it's easy to get back to articles marked read)
* macros
* key remapping
* can pre-specify default save folder for each newsgroup you read
* incredibly customizable, e.g., about how new newsgroups are treated
  
There are lots more great things about nn.

  -Nancy

--
 /\_/\
( o.o )   Nancy McGough       <URL:http://www.jazzie.com/ii/>
 > ^ <    Infinite Ink        <URL:ftp://ftp.halcyon.com/pub/ii>

---

From: Dale Huckeby <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 22:35:24 GMT

> ++++post or reply to [email-masked]....not THIS address.++++
  
    I guess I'll have to post this after all.  I tried using the above
  address and my e-mail bounced.

     I'm mailing but not posting this, because my impression is that such
  questions are beneath the notice of the people in this group.  But my
  experience is much less than theirs, more like yours (I presume), so *my*
  impressions and directions might conceivably be more relevant to your
  needs than those of a net guru who can't really remember how *unobvious*
  it all is at first.

     I noticed when I was reading the group a little bit ago that someone
  has already answered your post and is touting nn.  I've used nn and
  will likely do so more frequently in the future, but right now I prefer
  pine, particularly when I'm reading my primary newsgroup, which is
  alt.astrology.  What I *don't* like about nn is precisely what endears
  it to its fans, the fact that it gets rid of stuff as you scan and
  thus allows you to cover more ground in less time.  I finally figured
  out that if I'm looking at a menu page listing articles and hit the
  spacebar to go to the next page, the articles I passed over when I hit
  the spacebar to look at the next page will not be there the next time
  I invoke nn because of the auto-junk-seen default variable.  Now I
  enter a colon to bring up the command line right after I've hit <ret>
  to accept the first group nn presents me with on entry, and then I set
  that variable to off.  Thus: <:set auto-junk-seen off> <ret>.  But so far
  I haven't figured out how to keep it from reverting back to the original
  setting between sessions, so I have to do it over each time.  To make
  a long story short, when I first started using nn I inadvertently wiped
  out a lot of messages I would have liked to look at, and I'm still a
  little nervous about accidentally screwing things up when I'm using nn.  
  For that reason, if I finish a newsgroup and alt.astrology comes up 
  next, I immediately hit shift-q (i.e. capital Q) so as to exit and get 
  the hell out of Dodge, because if I inadvertently get rid of messages 
  they'll also be missing when I try to read alt.astrology from pine.

     I like pine because it's much more user-friendly, even if much more
  cumbersome and inefficient, than nn.  If you want something deleted you
  have to actually delete it, otherwise it'll stay there until its time
  is up.  That's fine with me when I'm reading my three favorite newsgroups
  (alt.astrology, soc.history.science, comp.mail.pine) because I like to
  glance at the first "page" of each message in those groups before hitting
  <d> for delete or <s> for save.  When you check each and every message,
  however briefly, to be sure you aren't missing anything that *might* be
  interesting or relevant, pine is as fast as nn.  If it's a less relevant
  newsgroup and you're just glancing through, nn is much faster.

     Okay, here's what I do when I read news.  When I'm in the main menu
  I hit <M> for Mail.  Once I get the pine menu screen I hit <L> for
  Folder List.  I then get a screen that looks like this:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Folder-collection <Mail/[]>     			           (Local)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
               
                [ Select Here to See Expanded List ]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
News-collection <News>                                             (Local)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

                [ Select Here to See Expanded List ]

     In my system, at least, the top "select here" is highlighted.  I then
  hit either the down arrow or <N> for next and it highlights the second
  one.  Then I hit <V> for view and it lists the newsgroups I'm subscribed
  to, with the first one highlighted.  Here's what my screen looks like:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------     
                           details omitted
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        
                              likewise
 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
News-collection <News> 						    (Local)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

alt.astrology           soc.history.science     sci.astro
alt.anthropology        soc.anthropology.paleo  soc.history
sci.history.moderated   efn.questions           comp.mail.pine

    I hit <V> again, pine opens alt.astrology, and I start reading.  There
  are ways to speed things up if you come home from a two-day trip, as I
  just did, and find 305 messages in one newsgroup and over 400 in another.
  There are also ways to configure pine that makes it work better for my
  purposes.  If this is helpful and you have more questions, I'll be happy
  to explain further.  Basically, I'm giving you the kind of help I would
  have liked someone to give me three months ago, or at least I hope I
  am.  Hope you're having as much fun with this stuff as I am.

						  - Dale Huckeby
				                    ([email-masked])

  p.s. Just like the gurus I just overlooked the obvious.  I think when you
  first enter News you'll be subscribed to every newsgroup under the sun.
  You can delete them all by hand, but it seems to me I wiped them all out
  and then added the groups I wanted by hitting <A> for Subscribe.  When
  you do that pine prompts you for the name of the group, you type it out
  and hit <ret>, and it appears on your screen.  

     Or I might have hit <F> from the main menu (not pine) to go to File
  Maintenance.  (I just now tried it out, after writing the above sentence,
  and I think that's what I did when I first started, when I was still
  using nn and hadn't yet realized I could read news in pine.)  After you
  hit <F> and are in the File Maintenance menu, hit <E> for Edit and when
  you're prompted for the name of the file type <.newsrc>.  What you'll
  see is a long list of newsgroups.  Each will have a colon after the name
  of the newsgroup, which means it's subscribed.  You want to change it
  to a <!> to indicate that it's unsubscribed.  I think you can unsubscribe
  everything at once and then go back and put <:> next to the ones you
  want to subscribe, but as I recall I simply erased all the ones I didn't
  want.  

    If you have problems with any of the above I'll experiment around and
  see what I can come up with.  Finally, if I've underestimated your level
  of experience and spelled things out in excessive detail, I apologize.
  I don't want to insult your intelligence, but I remember how *un*obvious
  things were for me three months ago and how irritated I got when some
  nerd would tell me to "go to your init file and . . ."  "So how do I get
  to my init file?" I wanted to say.  "Do I hafta catch a goddamned cab,
  or what?  Please don't ASSUME I know what you mean" . . . and I've tried
  not to with you.
					                         - D