[QUOTE="Fred"] Same one[/QUOTE] You're not listening...
Why, thank you Roger, now that you have enlightened me I will go and stick my head in the toilet where it apparently belongs. Egad, one would expect a minimum of manners from someone your age *plonk* yet again. -Peter
Manners from Bill Bullshit? You'te joking, of course! The only manners you'll get from him are surly or whiney. -- Regards, Nicolaas. 2005 Pricelessware CD now available. Pricelessware - the best of the best in freeware, as determined by the readers of alt.comp.freeware. E-Mail me for details: - mention CD in subject. .... Those who know, know who knows.
It's a free newsreader package. There are a number of free newsreaders. My rankings for them would be: 1=. Microplanet Gravity Current open sourced version of a commercial package (developers went out of business). Completely free. 2=. 40tude Dialog A very interesting Forte Agent clone. Nicely packaged. Free for personal use. 3. Free Agent Free version of the Forte Agent newsreader. Still uses horrible Windows 3.1 style idiosyncratic user interface. Not as automated as Gravity. Limited functionality in the free version. Like Gravity, Agent was sold off by its original developers and later bought back. 4=. Mozilla / Thunderbird Lacks the customisation / user options capabilities of preceding products. 5=. Outlook Express / Outlook News Reader Better options than Thunderbird, but less secure. 6. XNews Interesting product but not as well developed in functionality as the first three listings, e.g. lacks keyboard shortcuts. There are a number of others like NewsXpress, which only got to 2.0 before development stopped, and that was about 1996. You can still get them from some sites.
Gravity, Agent and Dialog (and possibly Thunderbird as well) all support single key navigational shortcuts. I remember the old Outlook Express and its predecessors required you to press Ctrl key combinations which required two fingers or hands. XNews, when I looked at it, offered a nice little toolbar, but shortcuts for Next or Previous article were missing. Looking at Gravity, here is some of the more commonly used ones: Go to the Next Article (Down) D View Next Unread in Thread E Go to the Previous Article (Up) U Next Local Article B Next Unread Article N Page Down or Next Article Space Move to Next Pane Tab or F6 Refresh Current Group F5 Switch to the Newsgroup pane 1 Switch to the Thread pane 2 Switch to the Article pane 3 Delete Selected Articles Del Mark the Selected Articles as Read K Watch Thread W Ignore Thread I Tag Selected Articles for Retrieval T Post a New Article P Reply by e-mail R Follow Up to the Current Article F View Binary V Add Score Entry S Collapse Selected Thread - Expand Selected Thread + Refresh Displayed Group F5 Toggle Display of Full Headers H Toggle Muting of Quoted Text Q
And so does Xnews No hands? What did you press your 'single key' commands with? Or do you mean, you require two hands to perform some menial task? Xnews has a few Ctrl key combos but most are single key, besides, Xnews is very highly configurable AFA keyboard shortcuts are concerned. Yes well, if (the last time you looked at Xnews) you had spent some time holding a cursor above the "nice little toolbar" you may've noticed a few of those single stroke keyboard shortcuts pop-up into onboard "help balloons". Looking at Xnews, here are some of the more commonly used ones: Go forward Alt + right (user config to single key) Go previous Alt + left (user config to single key) / Goes to next unread, same as next unread in thread, as messages are always threaded in Xnews. F5 To refresh all subscribed groups, Ctrl+F5 ditto [ and so on... In Xnews, if there isn't a [default] keyboard menu command to your liking, then you [Alt+K] and change it.
OK, I've had another look at XNews. I'd say therefore the primary limitation of XNews is that it is not an offline reader. All of the other products mentioned are capable of being used offline. They are therefore very useful for people using shared phone lines on dialup. Dialup handling is best supported in Gravity, Agent and Outlook Express. Dialog can be extended with scripting to provide semi automatic support of dialup. Mozilla relies on the system dialler but can be configured to go offline. XNews does not have an offline mode.
heh, you could have restrained yourself... I notice that you didn't reply to "Free agent is free" which was another stupid comment... if it werent free, it'd be called just "Agent".
I'm surprised you know the name yet couldn't find out what it was. http://lightning.prohosting.com/~tbates/gravity/start1.html[/QUOTE] I'm not good at finding things on the internet and I did look for five minutes before posting this question. So now you know I'm useless at searching. I came across it after checking the properties of some posts. Joy
