[Pan-users] Pan 0.12.90 Impressions

[Jim Henderson]

I like.....This is a *really* good build.

Found a few things that don't work the way they should, though; not sure
if any of these things have been reported or not.

1.  (This is probably a gtk2 thing) - I can no longer set shortcuts by
highlighting the menu item and pressing the key I want to assign.  How
can I assign shortcuts in this version of pan?

2.  Menu item missing - get new headers in subscribed groups.  There's a
button for it, but I preferred pressing a keystroke combination to
accomplish this task.

3.  On my display, the menus are really small; where can I set the font
size to be used in the menus?

4.  The option to display entire threads with matching articles doesn't
seem to work right.  I've got it turned on, but I only see the last few
messages (at most) in the subthread rather than the entire thread.  The
way this worked in 0.11.4 was perfect.

5.  In the screenshots I'd seen, the newsgroups are abbreviated, ie
"c.o.l.announce" instead of "comp.os.linux.announce".  I can't seem to
find a preference to set this like this.

6.  There is some *really* odd behaviour with follow-ups; I know there's
been some discussion about it so far - here's what I'm seeing right
now.  If I follow-up to a post, the posting fails because of a duplicate
message ID (I tried this with pan generating message IDs and with it
not, and that didn't seem to make a difference).  The message I'm
replying to ends up displaying the text of my message, even though my
message actually didn't get posted (verified by checking with another
newsreader); flushing the cache doesn't change this behaviour at all.

I installed the i686 RPM on my system; I'm having trouble locating all
the devel packages needed to build from CVS (largely due to pango's
devel package seeming not to be available, none of the archive sites
seem to have the 1.0.99 builds available any more).

I left everything in place from 0.11.4 - I wonder if that might explain
some of the strange behaviour I'm seeing.

Interface-wise, I really like what I'm seeing.  The fonts are MUCH nicer
and more readable; the addition of the spellchecker is really nice - are
there plans to include the ability to add words to a custom dictionary?

Keep up the good work, guys! :-)

Jim