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You'll also be able to browse quickly once you learn most of its keystroke commands.
| JUST A AMINUTE |
Here's a tip on an undocumented feature you won't find in the slrn manual page: You can scroll up and down through messages by using the left or right mouse buttons of your mouse. You can also use slrn in a menu-driven mode by enabling mouse support. This is handy if you run slrn in an xterm or rxvt window under X11. |
When you start slrn, the program will look under the /usr/lib/slrn directory for a file called slrn.rc, which contains system wide defaults for the program. You should copy this program as .slrnrc to your home directory, and make your changes to this file. Although there are many different customizations you can perform, a few are covered here to get you started.
To enable mouse support, look in your .slrnrc file for
% Enable xterm mouse support: 1 to enable, 0 to disable set mouse 0
Change set mouse 0 to set mouse 1 to enable menu- and mouse-driven modes in slrn. Another change you may want to make is how slrn displays messages and menus. Look for the Colors section of the .slrnrc file:
%------------------------------------------------------ % Colors %------------------------------------------------------ color header_number "black" "white" color header_name "black" "white" color normal "black" "white" color error "red" "white" color status "yellow" "blue" color group "blue" "white" color article "blue" "white" color cursor "black" "white" color author "blue" "white" color subject "black" "white" color headers "black" "white" color menu "yellow" "blue" color menu_press "blue" "yellow" color tree "red" "white" color quotes "red" "white" color thread_number "blue" "white" color high_score "red" "white" color signature "red" "white" color description "blue" "white" color tilde "black" "white"
These lines are in the format of display item, foreground color, and background color.
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According to the slrn manual page, these colors can be
black gray red brightred green brightgreen brown yellow blue brightblue magenta brightmagenta cyan brightcyan lightgray white
With a little bit of work, you can devise your own display. The slrn newsreader is a flexible, customizable program.
| JUST A MINUTE |
The pine program is almost two programs in one. Although most people will use pine primarily as a mail handler, pine can be an efficient way to read news, and can save you disk space if you don't have much room on your hard drive for other programs (especially if you're using a laptop computer). |
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