| There's probably an X resource or two that can be set to get things to come up
this way, but it *is* possible to see the whole newsgroup name.
1. Widen the newsgroup name pane (using the little box between it and the
article pane). This will give you lots of white space on the right in
the newsgroup name pane.
2. Stretch the name field: on the header above the newsgroup pane, position
your cursor between the "Name" and check-mark fields. The cursor should
change to an inverted "L". Stretch the name field to the desired width.
Or use a decent news reader; it's common knowledge that Netscape is one
of the worst. tin and xrn are popular alternatives. Maybe this has
improved in V4.0bugs2 (as a friend called it).
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| > 2. Stretch the name field: on the header above the newsgroup pane, position
> your cursor between the "Name" and check-mark fields. The cursor should
> change to an inverted "L". Stretch the name field to the desired width.
Hey, that's really cute! I'd sort of seen that funny little icon, of course,
but it didn't register as anything significant, because it doesn't really look
like anything recognizable. I'm pretty sure I'd never have guessed that the
trick was something like that. I wonder why they did something so cryptic,
when elsewhere on the same screen are the little "stretch buttons" that so
much X software has used from the beginning? I guess someone had a "better"
idea, but a totally nonintuitive one (at least to my feeble mind).
As for finding a better news reader; I was interested in giving netscape's a
chance to show what it could do. Maybe it's crummy; maybe it's the best one
around (for my purposes); I don't know. This silly thing with the truncated
newsgroup names had so far put it into the "utterly unusable" category. But
on NT it worked better, so I thought I'd investigate.
One thing that seems clear is that their documentation didn't help in the
least. It has the usual problem with documentation. If you have a question
of the form "Gee, I'd really like to use a `foo bar' command; I wonder what
it does?" then the documentation will give you an answer. But I don't ever
seem to have a questions in that form. What I always want to know is "I'd
like to do such-and-such a task; I wonder what sort of tool might do (part
of) it?" The "such-and-such" is generally an English phrase, and you can't
usually find it in the documentation (unless you already happen to know by
some magic where it is, in which case you don't need to find it).
This is why the VMS help stuff is so useless, of course, and if it weren't
for man's -k option (which doesn't work all that well either), Unix's manuals
would be equally poor. Thus, the other day I wanted to know, for several
machines, "How would a non-guru user discover what print queues will work
on a given machine?" On Unix, it wasn't easy, but I did eventually find
various clues in the man pages that would lead from the keywords "print"
and "queue" to the "lpq" command. On VMS, an hour of digging in the help
stuff turned up no clues whatsoever; I eventually had to ask someone who
had it written down on a piece of paper, and I don't consider that to be
a really good piece of advice to give to a customer.
In the news case, I did a bit more poking around in Netscape's online docs,
and even knowing the answer, I couldn't find it. Sigh.
As for the red flags, I did find some things about it in the netscape help
pages. Select Help..Handbook, and from there, go to the "Mail, News, and
Bookmarks" page. Then use Edit..Find to look for "flag", and you'll find
some comments on how it's used. It does look somewhat complicated; maybe
I'll experiment and see if I can get it to do anything useful.
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| (in the also admittedly poor Netscape mail reader, that is):
If I've got a mail message that I know will need further action, just not right
now (specifically, it provides input to a monthly newsletter), I check its
flag; when I'm ready to deal with it, I use "select flagged messages" and
the navigation commands under "Go" to pick those messages out of a much
larger folder.
Given that news messages only hang around a short time, it seems less useful
there; the traditional use of "flags" in news is to mark only a few messages
of interest, then mark the rest of a given newsgroup "read" and step through
the interesting messages, but I don't think the Netscape newsreader meshes
well with this model.
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