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Favorite NNTP Client?
keller asks: "We all have our favourite browser, mail client and OS! So what about Usenet Reader? I have always used Netscape's built-in one, and have always been satisfied, but are there better alternatives out there. I'm not looking for any features in particular, just something easy to use and nice to look at."
PAN (the Pimp Ass Newsreader) is without a doubt the best newsreader I've used on any platform. Pan seems to be Unix/Linux only, and is based on the gtk+ toolkit.
Check it out at http://pan.rebelbase.com.
I've never used it but I really like the release names: "Cherry Blossoms Fall" "Alethiometer" (cf. His Dark Materials trilogy ;)
"Why Don't You Just Make Ten Louder"
The author has humor and I'm gonna give this newsreader a try.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
I've had great luck using SLRN for both Windows and Linux. It is text only, but it respects your mime types and/or mailcap entries, so viewing graphical items isn't a problem. It also lets you use your favorite editor to compose news posts, which I find to be a definate plus.
Since slrn exists for nearly every major platform, those who switch between many boxen on a regular basis will benefit from having a consistent interface. Also, scoring, downloading multi-part binaries, editing your posts, and administering news groups are all simple and easy to learn.
I've tried dozens of news readers, and I've come to believe in slrn as the top of the pile. However, if you're just using an X environment and no other platform, pan (the Pimp Ass Newsreader) is a great graphical client.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
http://www.forteinc.com/
It was good enough for me to give up nn (and rn, and trn).
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...as I use Outlook Express ;)
:) try Outlook Express which is bundled with Internet Explorer for UNIX .
But IMHO this is a powerfull NNTP client, as it offers all I need to get, read, and post to a NNTP server.
And by the way, UNIX users may (I write this even if I'm sure they wont
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nico
Nico-Live
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Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)
http://xnews.3dnews.net/
IE for LINUX as part of the settlement...not cause I want it or anyrthing, just because it would hurt them so much to do it...
Of course better yet, perhaps the settlement agreement should stipulate 100% porting and compatibility of all MS apps in the Linux environment.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I always liked 'trn' under Unix, though I think it's pretty much been orphaned now. I've also heard good things about 'slrn' and 'nn'. All of these are console-based readers. I left the Unix scene too long ago to have found a good reader that runs under X.
Under Win32 I think that Microplanet's Gravity is a fantastic reader. It got orphaned a year or two ago (and the link is down now, so the company may be defunct) but you can still get it from various download sites. Try Webattack.
When Microplanet abandoned it they released the last build (v2.50) as freeware. Good going, guys! I liked it enough to pay for it at v1.1, and I'm glad it's still available.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I recently had zeonews recommended to me. It's reminiscient of OE, but shows a lot more functionality. I prefer it to OE and ForteAgent which are the only two I've used regularly.
Zeonews is the latest version of newsgrabber, of which you might be able to get an older version free.
At least, that's what I always say. I've used tin for ten years now (ever since 1.11PL2), and still is IMNAAHO the best text-based news client.
tin is menu-based, with lots of useful options (and not bloated with irrelevant stuff). The basic usage is very simple, and is pretty configurable. If you have a shell account in your ISP, it's the ideal choice.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
gnus allows you to filter posts with a manually controlled (but complex) scoring system, or you can turn on a mode which just watches what you tend to read and ignore, and attempts to filter posts you're not likely to enjoy based on who posted it and "artificial stupidity" performed on keywords in the subject lines.
gnus supports color highlighting of different reply levels within a post, useful for tracking the fragments of a discussion by the time a post is 8 replies into a thread.
You can access it remotely with only a text interface (even in color with xemacs or emacs21), or you can access it locally and have a nice graphical interface. If you're on the road, there's no worry about resetting all your read markers as you go to and from.
gnus is written in elisp, which makes it easy to add features you may want. And there are mailing lists and a newsgroup full of fanatics who love making changes if you've got an interesting idea, but don't have the aptitude to implement it.
And of course, like most emacs components, you can customize the hell out of gnus. If there's anything you don't like, chances are someone's already made a configuration option to change its behavior.
Filtering is trivial, writing & managing filters is easily done (and without needing to know any specific notation), scoring is performed identically, saving text and binaries is accomplished cleanly and with versatility, heck it can even be set to use voice commands and read back material. It honors every obscure usenet convention thown at it (mail-copies-to, X-face, etc.) and follows every good usage guideline plus handles multiple languages with aplomb.
Finally the documentation is simply fantastic. If nothing else this makes it a great program: Clear well-written comprehensive documentation properly laid out, indexed, usefully hyperlinked and always helpful. I can't express how important this is and how useful has been.
Oh yeah, it's a free (as in lucre) Mac application running under both MacOS & MacOS X. However MT-NewsWatcher is good enough friends have kept old Macs just for running it; it's that good.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'll have to second that recommendation. Development of Agent (and it's free little cousin, Free Agent) seemed to stop for a couple years, but Forte has recently released some upgrades. Their site indicates that users will be able to vote for new features on the eagerly anticipated Agent 2.0.
When I ran windows, Forte Agent from forteinc.com, really was the best nntp client I knew of. .sig settings, whether to download bodies or headers only, expire criterias etc.
/GPG support (not sure what to use it for, but I like it anyway)
I has some drawbacks though: It was cumbersome to use with more than one news.server, the built-in editor was very simple.
The pros:
Fast to load, fast responsive navigation, good keyboard shortcuts. Self contained in one directory, with nice text based config files, making it very easy to move it around, and preserve settings when reinstalling windows.
Nice, easely used options like; watch or ignore threads. Very powerfull 'per group' options, like
I think that Forte Agent was something of a trendsetter regarding GUI newsreaders in its time. And it was and offline newsreader, which really meant something when using a pay per minute modem connection.
Now my preferred nntp client is is KDE Knode, or rather it is not, since our current internet feed provider doesn't have usenet feed:-(, and the free newsservers, don't carry a some of the groups I am interested in.
But so far, Knode seems even more powerfull than Forte Agent in most respects.
Still, it lacks 'per group' expire options (a major letdown for me). And "Score killfiling" is not enough for me, I want real killfilling, eg. delete on the spot.
OTOH, it some really, really nifty features like ">" quote marked text, excellent PGP
All in all, Knode is a powerfull nntp client.
Superpimps "Pan" (GNOME) looks nice too (especially if one likes Forte Agent). Haven't used it in a long time, but AFAIK one of its main features, is its abillity to have several, concurrent downloads, from different servers.
trn is still slowly under development (http://trn.sourceforge.net/) and version 4 is pretty stable and still my favorite newsreader, despite being in beta for the better part of a decade.