III. Does anyone have any suggestions for X-based news-readers?

Note: Dedicated news readers may be interested in the GroupLens Project, "a collaborative filtering system that helps you work together with other people to find the quality news articles out of the huge volume of news articles generated every day", available for gnus, tin and xrn.

1. Gnus 5.0 (threaded) if you have Emacs 19.25+ or XEmacs (toolbar support is included), developed by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen.

   Gnus 5.x is designed to be a drop-in replacement, and thus fully compatible, with GNUS 4.x (developed by Masanobu Umeda). Almost all key bindings have been kept. More key bindings have been added, of course, but only in one or two obscure cases have old bindings been changed.

   The gnus FAQ is at: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/software/contrib/gnus/

   You need Emacs 19.30/XEmacs 19.13 (or better) to use versions after 5.1. Gnus 5 features:

   • the ability to subscribe to groups from different servers and the ability to mix groups from spools, nntp servers and mail backends;
   • mail reading; currently implemented mail backends can read mbox files, an mh-like spool and a mail spool with NOV databases;
   • infinite customizability;
   • kill-files feature auto-expiring kill calls;
   • scoring of articles in various ways and kill files that auto-expire;
   • virtual newsgroups (groups composed of several other groups);
   • foreign servers, which gives you an easy way to subscribe to foreign groups;
   • asynchronous article pre-fetch;
   • adaptive scoring scheme for types of articles read most often, and lots more.

   The latest version of Gnus, 5.2, is available at:

   www.gnus.org/distribution.html or
   

2. xrn (not threaded) is a NNTP-based newsreader, (originally developed by Ellen M. Sentovich & Rick L. Spickelmier) now maintained by Jonathan I. Kamens, based on rn (a termcap-based news-reader written by the reverend Larry Wall); it is popular with novice users and looks rather elegant when compiled with the 3D Athena Widgets developed by formidable Kaleb Keithley.

   The latest version 9.02, is available for ftp from:

   ftp://sipb.mit.edu/pub/xrn/xrn.tgz

   ftp://ftp.x.org:/contrib/applications/xrn/xrn-9.02.tgz

   A mailing-list dedicated to announcements of new releases and bugs is available; see the README accompanying the distribution.

3. mxrn (not threaded) Motif-based NNTP news reader that has had part of the functionality of `rn' added since a number of users are `rn' users. Much of the `rn' functionality that mxrn currently has was not in the original plan; e.g. kill-files.

   The latest version is 6.18, but 6.17 seems to be the only one widely available for ftp at the following sites:

   geocub.greco-prog.fr:/pub/X11/mxrn.tar.Z

   sun.soe.clarkson.edu:/pub/src/mxrn/

4. xvnews (not threaded) is a simple, intuitive Open-LOOK compliant NNTP-based newsreader that uses the XView libraries.

   The latest release, 2.3, is available for ftp from:

   ftp.twi.tudelft.nl:/pub/news/xvnews-2.3.tar.gz

   ftp.uu.net:/networking/news/readers/xvnews/xvnews-2.3.tar.gz.

5. Netscape is a Web-browser, developed by Netscape Communications (consisting mostly of the developers of the popular NCSA Xmosaic Web-browser), that includes a built-in threaded news-reader, mail-reader, coffee-maker, &c.

   On March 31st, 1998, the source code to the Netscape browser, Mozilla, was made available and in true Californian style, there was a party to celebrate the occasion. Netscape is available from the Netscape Comm. home-page at:

   http://www.netscape.com

   or via ftp at:

   ftp://ftp.netscape.com.

   Support for kill-files still missing from Netscape but now that it's in the hands of the proles, this may soon be a thing of the past.

6. nn-tk, developed by Toivo Pedaste, is based on the NN newsreader (NN commands should still work). nn-tk provides a GUI interface with command menus and buttons, the use of the mouse to select articles, a scrolling panel for displaying articles and group selection using either of scrolling panel or cascading menus. Support for MIME messages if EXMH is installed.

   The latest version is available for ftp from:

   ftp.uwa.edu.au:/pub/nn/contrib/nn-tk.beta.12.1.tar.gz

7. Refer to part 4 of the comp.lang.tcl FAQ for an extensive list of other newsreaders (tknews, arTCLs) that have been written with Tcl/Tk. The latest version of the FAQ is always available for ftp from:

   ftp://ftp.neosoft.com/languages/tcl/alcatel/docs/tcl-faq.part04.gz

8. Knews (threaded), developed by Karl-Johan Johnsson, features:
   
   • true threading, with a graphical tree for the threads;
   • full support for reading MIME articles;
   • regexp searching in articles and the newsgroups;
   • options to skip the active file or group descriptions on startup;
   • fontification (colours & fonts) for quoted text and headers in articles;
   • support for multiple nntp servers;
   • kill-file support;
   • articles, subjects and threads can be killed or marked with color based on various criteria;
   • tagging of articles and saving, uudecoding or piping them.

   The latest version, 1.0b.1, is available at:
   http://www.matematik.su.se/~kjj/knews-1.0b.1.tar.gz

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