[Pan-users] Re: Finding unread posts

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 07 Oct 2008
16:27:04 +0000:

>> An icon color change may be useful, yes.  You might wish to file a bug
>> suggesting it.
> 
>       Hmmm ... OK, I'll try to get to it. Starting with where and how,
> of course, but I presume I can manage those, when i find time, or
> you'd've warned me of any gotchas.

The easiest way to file a bug is from pan itself.  Help menu, Give 
feedback or report a bug.  Assuming you have the browser setup correctly 
(IIRC you do since I believe we dealt with that in a previous episode 
=:^), that should open to the GNOME bugzilla, with the bug already 
started for pan, and a few of the fields already filled out.  If your 
browser doesn't have a cookie from a previous GNOME bugzilla 
registration, it'll ask you to do that, but once you've setup a GNOME 
bugzilla account, it saves a LOT of hassle over starting a bug manually 
on their bugzilla.  I know, as I've tried it!

>> Meanwhile, here, I use the "Match only unread articles"

>       Hmmm.... Dunno if I could operate that way. I use Pan mainly for
> monitoring *very* busy lists, such as the fedora one I mentioned; and my
> threads may go a long time without follow-ups, or get as busy as the one
> I gave as an example; I seldom know which in advance. But I highlight
> all mine ASAP, which then serve as reminders; in some cases, that means
> ask again elsewhere.
> 
>       Is your usage much like that?

I use pan for all my lists (using gmane of course), some busy, some not.  
In particular, the gentoo-dev list can have threads with several hundred 
replies in a couple days if there's a hot thread going on, so yes, I do 
know about that aspect, and it works well for me.

I'm not sure what you mean by highlighting yours, except that you can of 
course setup a score to score your posts (and followups if desired).

I don't treat my own posts different than normal, but if I find a post I 
don't want to deal with at that moment, I'll hit the "mark unread" on it, 
so pan keeps it in view next time I enter the group.  Since most posts 
are marked read and I have pan set to hide already read posts by default, 
only the posts still marked unread show up when I reenter the group.  
There's a distinction between what I've read and re-marked unread and 
messages I've never read at all, too, since the re-marked ones will have 
the little disk icon since they're already cached, while the new ones 
won't, since they're not downloaded yet.

>> If I find I need to go back and read a message originally read in a
>> previous session, I toggle the view only unread option to off, so it's
>> showing me read articles as well.  Actually, while pan doesn't have a
>> default keyboard accelerator mapped to do that, pan does allow keyboard
>> accelerator customization, and I've mapped the "R" key to toggle the
>> option, so all I have to do is hit "R" and it toggles for me.
> 
>       I'll have to look up keyboard accelerator; it sounds like what we
> used to call a macro --several lines of anything from text to several
> nested commands, all invoked by something like Ctrl-Y or Alt-Z.

It's the same idea, but nothing that complex.  You're probably aware that 
in pan you can simply hit "F" (by default) to start a followup post, 
right?  That's an accelerator key or hotkey.  Pan has a way to remap 
those; you can map any action on the menu to any key (plus modifiers, 
shift, alt, ctrl, as desired) and I've remapped quite a few of mine, 
setting up my own accelerator/hotkey scheme.  One of the remappings I did 
was to set the "R" key to toggle the view only unread menu entry, since I 
use that enough that the keyboard accel is useful.

I've posted the hotkey/accels remapping instruction details here quite a 
few times, but not in the nice step-by-step you like.  If it sounds 
interesting; if you've had menu entries that you wished had hotkeys that 
don't or conversely, that have hotkeys you're always hitting 
accidentally, let me know, and I'll see about posting a nice simple 
version this time.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman