news readers

[forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk]

i use help/help with some supporting commands.  the /help/news bits
are relatively trivial:

     15 /help/news/Post
      9 /help/news/Save
     17 /help/news/compose
     10 /help/news/lib
     45 /help/news/next
      8 /help/news/oldnews
     22 /help/news/read
     10 /help/news/save
      1 /help/news/stf
     17 /help/news/titles
      9 /help/news/unread
    163 total

they link and create help/help text frames with small C programs
and rc scripts that fetch things from the /news directory
(imported from a plan 9 cpu server dedicated to serving news,
using an Alef program to manage the news database).
/help/news/unread relies on inews/unread, a small C program that
compares /news/Lib/active and $home/News/.newsrc, producing a file
$home/News/Unread that lists the news groups with new articles (and the
range of unread news).  inews/unread might well be an awk script, but
i had already written most of it for another system.  /help/news/unread
copies Unread into a new frame.

i click in that frame on the group i want to read, then click button 2 on `titles'.
/help/news/titles fetches the selected line from Unread,
isolates the group and range (using sed and eval),
builds a new frame, and calls {inews/present | inews/derange $range}
to fill it with a list of titles, sorted by subject.  (i could also
use inews/threadf if i needed things organised by thread.)  inews/present
and inews/threadf come from Geoff Collyer's news overview package
(the former is just an awk script that massages the .overview file).
inews/derange is a 44 line C program that strips already read articles
from the output of inews/present.

i click on the article i want to read, then click button 2 on `read'.
once i am reading, i can simply click button 2 on `next' to get the
next article or group.

`compose' allows me to Post an article.

Acme would let me bypass some of the button clicks (eg,
hitting a group name with button 3 could automatically provide the titles,
and touching an article name with button 3 could pop up the article).
even so, i find the current one more than adequate for my news reading.
putting it together wasn't much effort, and freed me from having
to use big complex Unix news readers (in fact, until the SGIs arrived,
i wasn't using Unix anymore at all).  the emacs package to read news
is over 6000 lines of Elisp (last time i counted), but i doubt it does
6 times as much, and at least i avoid RSI.

i don't even want to speak about rn and its wretched configure script...