Finding Emacs - Gnus (news)

The Emacs documentation says that Gnus can be used for Newsgroup reading and Email.  It all seems a bit opaque as you start, however, when all else fails, read the documentation.  Even though most manuals are more "reference manuals" than "how-to" manuals, there are a couple of things straight up that let you get connected to reading newsgroups.

First, you have the option of placing your gnus initialisation instructions in either " init.el " or in " ~/.gnus.el ".  Placing them in the gnus.el file means that they are removed from the init.el and they are only read when gnus is started.  So all that is needed is to place these lines in whichever of the two files you have chosen:

;; Gnus
(setq gnus-select-method '(nntp "news.somewhere.com"))

I note in one tutorial I found that there is also an option to place the nntp port in the server instruction, however I didn't see it mentioned in the reference manual.

Three ways you can start Gnus:

• Menu
• M-x gnus or 
• M-x gnus-other-frame

Once you start, you will be presented with a restricted subset of the available newsgroups in the current buffer.  To retrieve the full alphabetically sorted list

AA

Now you can move the cursor round and enter and read whichever groups you fancy.  With the cursor over a group you want to subscribe to

u

Now, Groups>Listing>List unread subscribed groups     ( or   l  - small L)

I haven't been too intent on learning Gnus in depth, since newsgroups are not particularly interesting to me at the moment, however I did check that highlighted articles (even multiple highlighted articles) with binary attachments can be decoded and saved with:

Article>MIME>Extract all parts

Searching Google with " Gnus Tutorial " was quite productive and these are a couple I found:

• Linux Journal Gnus Tutorial  (also has tutorial on email)
• Gnus Tutorial

This is enough to get started, and a little more dilligence will show in more detail how to best use this tool.  Like everything in Emacs, the tools overlap, so learn one and parts are of benefit elsewhere.  With one tool you know well such as Emacs, you can take it anywhere with you and not have to start afresh on a different system.


Later ............