What program should I use to read news?

Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

5.10. What program should I use to read news?

Dozens of programs exist with which you can read Usenet news. These pieces of software--appropriately called newsreaders--may be complex or simplistic, but they all show you the Usenet news. The programs available to you depend on what system you're reading news on. If you are accessing the Internet by running SLIP on a Macintosh, your choices are completely different than if you're dialing into a VAX to read news. Because the majority of Internet folks use UNIX, this answer focuses on popular newsreaders available for UNIX. A full overview of all newsreaders for every system could take a chapter of its own and bore us all to death.

If you do use a UNIX system, remember that not every site will have all of the following newsreaders, so your choices may be more limited. If you don't use UNIX, check with your system administrator to see what newsreaders are available to you.

Note: The following part of the answer was provided by Rahul Dhesi (dhesi@rahul.net)

You can read news by using any of a number of news reading programs. To help you decide which you should use, a brief description of each is given in the following text. Most Usenet users prefer to use nn, trn, or tin.

readnews. This is one of the simplest news readers available. It is line-oriented, so it does not make much use of cursor movements. It will show you each newsgroup one by one. Within each newsgroup, it will show you each article one by one. For each newsgroup or article, answer with y to see it or n to skip it. Due to the high volume of postings on Usenet, it will take you a long time to go through them with readnews; it is not very good at letting you select a small subset of articles to read except by answering yes or no to each. You should use readnews only if you want to get started reading news right away without spending much time learning to read news. As soon as you are comfortable with readnews, you should switch to one of the more powerful news readers.
vnews. This is screen-oriented, so it will position article headers and other information at the top and bottom of the screen. This makes it a little friendlier to the eyes than readnews. Vnews also gives you more options than readnews. It is approximately as easy to use as readnews. Like readnews, vnews is not very good at letting you select a small subset of articles to read, except by answering yes or no to each. You should use vnews if you want a screen-oriented display and if you want to get started reading news right away without spending much time learning to read news. As soon as you are comfortable with vnews, you should switch to a more powerful news reader.
rn. This is more powerful than readnews and vnews and has much more online help. It is also a little harder to learn. You can easily skip all articles on any topic that does not interest you. You should use rn only if you are already familiar with it. If you are not already familiar with rn, try trn instead; it does everything that rn does and quite a bit more.
trn, nn, and tin. These three news readers are quite powerful and flexible, and it is not easy to decide which is the best. Each one has some interesting features. nn is oriented toward selecting articles to read on the basis of their subject heading; it recognizes all articles with the same subject and can present them as a single menu item. Both trn and tin are oriented towards tracking "threads" of discussion, based on who responded to which article, independent of what the subject headings might be. And nn and tin are also very good at letting you decode software posted to the newsgroups in various encoded formats. The nn program is excellent when you are searching for articles with specific subjects. You should probably try all three news readers or ask other people what they think.
gnus. This is a mode within the emacs editor. If you are not a regular user of emacs, you should probably not use gnus; many of its subcommands assume familiarity with emacs. If you do use emacs, you might find it interesting to try gnus. It has many of the good features of the other news readers, but its drawback is its slow speed. To invoke gnus, first invoke emacs, type ESC, ^X (Ctrl-X), and then gnus. To get online help from within gnus, type ^C ^I.
Others. There is a news reader called tass which is old; it was adapted to create tin, which replaced it. There might be sites that have tass and not tin. There is also software called notes that is not much used any more. It was independently created to do the same thing as Usenet news software, but later it got gatewayed to Usenet and just became an alternative interface for the same thing. I have never used it, but some sites might still have it.

Help! Too many choices? Don't let all these choices confuse you. If you want to keep it simple and can't decide which news reader to use, begin with vnews. After one or two weeks of using vnews, you can explore the other news readers. If in doubt, try trn, because it is slightly easier to use than nn and is faster than tin.

Note: By the way, Rahul prefers nn, Kevin prefers trn, and Dave Taylor likes tin best, proving that no program is perfect for everyone.

Here's an example of what the trn newsreader looks like. (You should try it. It's my favorite newsreader, but it's not particularly easy to learn.)

======   6 unread articles in alt.fan.laurie.anderson -- read now?
[+ynq] n
======  24 unread articles in comp.infosystems.wais -- read now? [+ynq]
n
======   4 unread articles in alt.internet.services -- read now? [+ynq]
y
Reading overview file...
alt.internet.services          4 articles

a+Thomas Dowling    1  >Stock quotes from the Internet
b Dave Taylor       1  >The internet mall
d DaveHatunen       1  >Anonymous mail
e Rick Duffy        1  >How many people are on the Internet? (Flame!!)

-- Select threads (date order) -- All [Z>] --

Here's what the tin newsreader looks like. tin uses a friendly screen-oriented display.

       1     6  alt.fan.laurie.anderson                Will it be a
music conce
       2     4  alt.internet.services                  Not available in the
uuc
       3    24  comp.infosystems.wais                  The Z39.50-based WAIS
fu
       4    15  alt.internet.talk-radio                Carl Malamud's
Internet
       5   151  comp.sys.mac.hypercard                 The Macintosh
Hypercard:
       6        alt.radio.internet
       7     5  alt.etext
       8        a2i.announce
       9        a2i.general
      10        a2i.modems
      11        news.announce.important                General announcements
of
      12        news.announce.newusers                 Explanatory postings
for
      13   233  alt.config                             Alternative subnet
discu
      14   804  news.answers                           Repository for
periodic
      15     7  news.lists                             News-related
statistics
      16    42  news.misc                              Discussions of USENET
it

       <n>=set current to n, TAB=next unread, /=search pattern,
c)atchup,
    g)oto, j=line down, k=line up, h)elp, m)ove, q)uit, r=toggle
all/unread,
      s)ubscribe, S)ub pattern, u)nsubscribe, U)nsub pattern, y)ank
in/out

Threading articles...
                              Group Selection (77)
h=help


                    alt.fan.laurie.anderson (3T 6A 0K 0H R)
h=help

     1  +    Laurie Anderson's _Nerve Bible_ book            woody
     2  + 3  Lovely Laurie                                   Godes Shimon
     3  + 2  William S. Burroughs                            Rob
Hilton

Yuck! Everyone (except perhaps beginners) should avoid readnews at all costs. It's so simple that it's impossible to use for any length of time.

---------------------------------
Newsgroup alt.fan.laurie.anderson
---------------------------------

Article 394 of 398, Fri 06:31.
Subject: Re: William S. Burroughs
From: steve@dusty.unet.umn.edu (Steve Fletty @ University of Minnesota,
Networki
ng Services.)
(34 lines) More? [ynq] n

Article 395 of 398, Wed 04:35.
Subject: Re: Lovely Laurie
From: godes@decscc.tau.ac.il (Godes Shimon @ Tel-Aviv University Computation
Cen
ter)
(14 lines) More? [ynq] n

Article 398 of 398, Mon 16:16.
Subject: Laurie Anderson's _Nerve Bible_ book
From: C562611@mizzou1.missouri.edu (woody @ University of Missouri,
Columbia)
(17 lines) More? [ynq] n

-------------------------------
Newsgroup alt.internet.services
-------------------------------

Article 17557 of 17560, Wed 10:20.
Subject: Re: Stock quotes from the Internet
From: tdowling@lib.washington.edu (Thomas Dowling @ University of
Washington)

(18 lines) More? [ynq] y

Table of Contents | Previous Section | Next Section