tekn...@hotmail.com writes:
> Good post Aaron and let me try and explain from a die-hard Agent users
> perspective:
> On 05 Nov 1999 16:30:37 -0700, Aaron Ginn <aaron.g...@motorola.com> wrote:
> >This is not a troll. I've read several posts by Windows advocates
> >stating how much they love Forte Agent. Why? What is so great about
> >this newsreader that makes it so indispensable to Windows users? I've
> >used it, and it's OK, but I honestly don't see the big deal. What
> >features does it have that make you think it's any better than any of
> >the Linux newsreaders? Is it simply because it has little buttons you
> >can click on? I don't get it.
> >I use Gnus under XEmacs, and AFAICT, Agent simply cannot keep up with
> >it. Here's what I love about Gnus. Keep in mind that I am not an
> >experienced Agent user, so some of these features may be available and
> >I simply don't know about them. Please let me know if they are,
> >because I'd love to try them out.
> >1) Scoring - Gnus allows you to score a post by Author, Subject,
> > References, Followup, and many, many more. AFAICT, Agent allows
> > you to kill posts by Author and Subject, and that's it. Here's an
> > example of how I use scoring. I subscribe to mp3 groups which can
> > have thousands of articles. If I want to give a higher priority to
> > Led Zeppelin mp3s, I simply tell Gnus to add 1000 to any post that
> > has Led Zeppelin in the subject. I can also use regular
> > expressions to match as well. Thus, when I open the group, all the
> > LZ mp3s are pushed to the top. Also, I search for subjects that
> > have the regexp 01\/[0-9]+ in them. That pushes the first part of
> > a multipart post to the top so I don't have to look for the first
> > part. Can Agent do this?
> Scoring is not one of Agents strong points. It doesn't score as far as I
> know, but I don't have need of that feature anyway. I prefer to killfile
Maybe you don't appreciate scoring because you've never really used
it. I would never consider using a newsreader that didn't score,
because it provides a method of cutting through all the noise on
Usenet quickly and efficiently.
Here's another example. My scorefile scores all of my posts and any
follow-ups to my posts very highly. When I open a group, my posts (and
their follow-ups) are always listed at the top of the group summary.
Obviously, my posts are probably more important to me than any others,
so I want to read them first. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned that I
can expire a specific score after a specified time.
> and it does that reasonably well although slrn was better at that. Joining
> multipart messages is automatic and comes in handy for mp3 groups where
> entire albums are posted.
> BTW I have yet to see an mp3 group with thousands of messages. How often do
> you pull news?
I admit, I probably check the mp3 groups once a week. By then, there
_are_ thousands of them. I'd check them more often, but my wife gets
annoyed with how much time I spend on the computer already! :)
> >2) Citation - Gnus will mark citations in whatever color I want them
> > to be specified in. I'm not talking about just marking everything
> > in blue from all the previous posts in a thread. Gnus will give
> > each level of post in a thread a different color so that I can
> > clearly see who said what without trying to figure it out from the
> > >>'s. I can also click on "wrote:" in the reference and this will
> > toggle the post in question. Thus if I have the following line in
> > a post:
> > On Fri, 05 Nov 1999 22:01:07 GMT, p...@ix.nospam.com (Paul) wrote:
> > if I click on "wrote:", all of Paul's post disappears. I can turn
> > it back on by clicking again. It really makes for a clean read.
> Agent provides a true gui based tree where you can see all of the messages,
> replies and so forth in a true gui tree, unlike SLRN where it looks
> aborted. You can change the colors, fonts, columns all on the fly as well
> as scroll back and see what you have already read. All on an individual
> group basis and all on the fly.
I'll have to admit, I'm not a big slrn fan, mostly because I'm not a
big vi fan. I know you can use other text editors with slrn, but if
I'm going to use XEmacs anyway, there's no point in using slrn over
Gnus.
> >3) Mail - Yes, I read mail with Gnus as well. For someone who reads
> > Usenet as much as I do, it just makes sense. It organizes my Mail
> > folders just like newsgroups and that is very cool, IMO.
> You can set up as many folders under Agent as you like and the beauty is
> you can see them all at once and look at old messages right from the main
> screen. Very easy and intuitive to do. You can move messages around via
> drag and drop to your hearts content.
> >4) Auto-expiry - I subscribe to several mailing lists, and I can tell
> > Gnus to sort mail by subject, sender, etc. into folders that I
> > specify. Thus, all my mail from the Red Hat list goes into a
> > red-hat folder. I can set any group folder I want to automatically
> > delete a post after a specified period of time once I read it.
> > This makes sure that my Mailbox doesn't get too full with mailing
> > list posts.
> You can set the expiration (purge in Agent speak) to any number of days you
> like. Again real time no config file to edit, although you can manually
> edit Agent.ini if you like.
Gnus provides a GUI front-end to almost all it's customization, so you
don't have to ever edit an Emacs-lisp file if you don't want to. It's
not hard, though.
> >These are just a few. Everything in Gnus is customizable. I can do
> >just about anything with it.
> >So why is Agent any better?
> Ease of setup, totally integrated including a good spell checker. Joining
> of multiparts. Displaying of html. Displaying of test greater than 80
> columns easily. Live, real time customization on a group by group basis.
> Want to be teknite in one group S in another and jedi in yet another?
> Five seconds real time and it is done under Agent.
> Display window presents useful information in a all in one snapshot.
> Changing fonts, colors, line spacing spell checking etc all on a group by
> group basis and all real time. No editing of config files necessary.
> Attachments show up as nice easy to read icons and you can launch them,
> join them or virus check them with a single mouse click. You can save,
> delete or store them in an alternate location all on a group by group
> basis, all easily set up and all real time. One mouse click and it is done.
> I could go on and on, and I admit I have never used Gnu's, but I have used
> virtually every Linux news reader out there, settling on SLRN and that was
> a large downgrade for me, and nothing,I repeat nothing, has come close to
> Agent for ease of use and features that the majority of people would want.
> I spent a good afternoon just trying to get acceptable colors out of SLRN.
> I can do the same in 5 minutes under Agent.
> If I post a message under SLRN it asks me 4 questions before it does it (do
> you want to post? do you want to save?save here? and some other one I can't
> remember). It takes 5 programs to do under Linux what Agent does by itself.
> SLRNPULL, SLRN, ISPELL and VI and Sendmail.
Speaking of offline reading, Gnus actually has an Agent mode called
gnus-agentize. I've never used it, so I don't know how well it works,
but if you ever do want to look at Gnus, it's there.
> The choice argument has little weight because we are talking about reading
> and writing mail/news here not writing a thesis. VI is overkill to the
> highest degree.
> I can have Agent setup and running in 5 minutes, long before the average
> user figures out how to edit the .slrnrc file, or even to rename it from
> slrn.rc to .slrnrc so the damm program works properly.
> Multiple users are simple under Agent. Just setup a shortcut to point to
> their own subdirectory. No file editing needed and their setup is
> completely independent from any on else.
> Agent is popular because it is easy, it works and it satisfies the needs of
> most people, by far.
> tek
> >Aaron
You make some good points. I'll admit, ease of use is not a strong
point of Gnus, or Emacs for that matter. However, I've often found
that ease of use often comes at the expense of flexibility, which can
quickly get in the way of a power user.
Aaron
--
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