[Pan-users] Re: downloading bodies (and external editor on Windows)

[Duncan]

Frank Van Damme posted on Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:56:45 +0000 as excerpted:

> After a pretty long time of usenet inactivity, I once again downloaded
> Pan and I am wondering what happened to the option to "download new
> headers and bodies in the current group"? I can only download new
> headers. Which is not what I want for text-only groups.

Pan underwent a rewrite in the time you were away.  You must have been 
using old-pan before.  It was C based.  New-pan is C++ based, and doesn't 
have that feature yet, tho it's better in many other ways (automatic/
transparent multi-server handling, MUCH better at memory scaling for 
large groups with millions of headers/overviews, among other things).

So basically, download headers, select-all, download messages (or 
download to cache).  Of course, pan's cache is only 10 MB, but that 
shouldn't be a huge problem for text-only groups, and you can set it to 
the size you want by editing preferences.xml directly.

FWIW, you /can/ now setup pan to run "headless", that is, without a GUI, 
and collect headers and then quit.  You could schedule this with cron or 
the MS task scheduler. (Presumably they still have such a thing in 
eXPrivacy and beyond...)  See pan's command-line options (run it with 
--help in the terminal window, or at least that's how it works on Linux).

Unfortunately, that doesn't work for whole messages.  But you /may/ be 
able to setup some sort of automation to feed pan the appropriate 
keystrokes to select all and download to cache.  I used to do that with 
various other apps on MS all the time, back around the turn of the 
century.

Another alternative is to use a news server such as leafnode, and set it 
to download every hour or whatever.  Then the messages are already 
locally cached when you go to read them.

> Another small Q: how do I use an external editor on Windows? I'd like to
> use vim (gvim).

When I switched from MS due to eXPrivacy, I pretty quickly went all 
freedom-ware (well, save for one very old game I still run in DOSBOX, 
DOSBOX is freedomware, the game running in it is not).  I couldn't even 
run MS proprietaryware if I wanted to now, since I can no longer agree to 
the EULA.

Thus, I'm the wrong person to ask about MS specific stuff, but I'm sure a 
couple of the folks running it on MS will be around soon enough to 
answer.  Presumably it's not much different than on Linux, however.  Set 
the application options (browser, mail, external text-editor) on the 
appropriate tab of preferences, either to work with the default for your 
environment of choice (based on mimetype/extension), or choose custom and 
set it to a specific app.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman