SELECTNEWS(1)

NAME
selectnews - USENET subscribe/unsubscribe utility.

VERSION
1.0

SYNOPSIS
selectnews

DESCRIPTION
selectnews provides an easy to use interface for users to subscribe and unsubscribe to USENET newsgroups. It was written on a 486DX running Linux v0.99pl9, and uses the curses (or ncurses) library.

To use, the user must be in his/her home directory, and a .newsrc file must exist. selectnews will only allow you to subscribe/unsubscribe groups that are listed in your .newsrc ; it will not directly read the USENET database. Your news reader probably automatically appends new newsgroups onto your .newsrc , so this should not be a problem.

INSTRUCTIONS

selectnews divides the screen in two, the left half displaying the unsubscribed newsgroups (listed in the .newsrc ), and the right half displaying the subscribed newsgroups.

The following are the available keyboard commands. Note that extended keys (such as the arrow keys) may or may not work with your version of selectnews. This is dependent on the version of curses or ncurses used to compile this program. selectnews is case-independent.

'h', 'l', <space>, <left>, <right>
    Switch the cursor between windows.

'j', <down>
    Move the cursor down.

'k', <up>
    Move the cursor up.

'>', <next page>
    Scroll down one page.

'<', <prev page>
    Scroll up one page.

'0' Go to the first page.

'$' Go to the last page.

<return>'
    Subscribe/unsubscribe group.

'g' Subscribe/unsubscribe all.

's' Sort buffer.

'f' Find item.

'w' Save old .newsrc as .newsrc.old and write changes to .newsrc.

'q' Quit without saving. selectnews will prompt you before quitting.

DISTRIBUTION

Source, executable, and all documentation for selectnews are freely distributable under the terms and restrictions of the HCS General Distribution License. Please read the file LICENSE.HCS for more information.

BUGS

This program uses a doubly linked list; in other words, it is a memory hog.

The sort procedure is inefficient (quick sorts are not especially conducive to linked lists). Long buffers will take a long time (and a lot of CPU cycles) to sort.

AUTHOR
Eugene Eric Kim, eekim@husc.harvard.edu