Re: a couple of newbie questions with gnus

[Tassilo Horn]

unoder.spam@spam.jay.net (Martin Jørgensen) writes:

Hi Martin,

>> One of which is that you poste too long lines, right?
>
> It doesn't annoy me and nobody complained until now. Is it a problem?
> Because I assumed that most usenet-clients just wrap long lines so
> they don't see any problem at all?

The problem is that quoting is harder to do (for inferior newsreaders
than Gnus). So it's more or less a common rule to wrap lines statically
at 72 columns.

> Ok, thanks. Suppose I want to outcomment something, should I then use
> ";;" in front of each line?

Yes, but the number of semicolon is not important. (It merely affects
indentation.)

> 1) Currently I use this "aquamacs emacs" since it was shipped with
> auctex and previewtex and I don't know how to setup that from a "clean
> emacs". So it constantly opens stupid windows that I can't "C-x o"
> between.... I have to mouse-click them to select them... Annoying.

To switch between "Frames" (thats emacsian for Windows in sense of
window manager units) use `C-x 5 o'.

BTW: I've heard that Aquamacs is not that good. At least it's a
de-emacsified emacs. So probably you want to switch to yaced [1].

> 2) If I try open gnus from "yaced emacs" I get this:

Oh, I see you tried yaced. :)

> Loading help-fns...done
> Loading gnus-start...done
> Loading gnus-agent...done
> Wrote /Users/mac/.newsrc-dribble
> Gnus auto-save file exists.  Do you want to read it? (y or n) 
> Reading /Users/mac/.newsrc.eld...
> Reading active file from 192.168.1.134 via nntp...
> Loading timezone...done
> No new newsgroups
> Checking new news...
> byte-code: gnus-agent-read-agentview no longer supports version 1.
> Stop gnus, manually evaluate
> gnus-agent-convert-to-compressed-agentview, then restart gnus.
>
> Anyone know what that's about?

When the error happens, do 

  `M-x gnus-agent-convert-to-compressed-agentview' 

and restart Gnus.

> 3) In mozilla thunderbird I enabled this option "Only show threads
> with new postings" so it'll automatically show the whole thread *only
> if* there are new replies in that thread. Threads where everything is
> read won't be shown...
>
> This is really nice - is it possible to do something with gnus?

Sure, that's the default. Did you set gnus-fetch-old-headers to
anything?

> 4) What's this ~/.newsrc-dribble file doing?

It saves what you've read, scores and such. When you exit Gnus, this
file will somehow be merged into .newsrc.eld. If Gnus/Emacs crashes,
then it will be used to recover your session.

Bye,
Tassilo

Footnotes: 
[1] http://yaced.sourceforge.net/
-- 
"Emacs is not a development tool but a way of life."
     - David Kastrup in alt.religion.emacs -