Bud Rogers
Fair warning: gnus is a function of [x]emacs. If you're comfortable with the emacs way of doing things you'll probably find gnus pretty comfortable too. If you hate emacs, you probably won't care for gnus either...
I'm not sure. One can become a proficient Gnus user while knowing very little about Emacs. (It goes for David Gillespie's Calc, by the way. :-) Both Gnus and Calc redefine the whole keymap for the buffers they use, so there is nothing much to know about the usual Emacs ways of doing things. I may be exaggerating a bit, but it is not far from the truth that all you have to know, once set up, is `emacs -f gnus' at the shell prompt to get into Gnus, and `C-x C-c' to get out of Emacs once done with Gnus. However, if you use Gnus to reply to messages or articles, then you will edit your reply in a more regular buffer, and _there_, knowing more of Emacs is surely useful. One of my friends do not like learning key sequences, and within GNU Emacs and Gnus, he almost exclusively uses the mouse menus and bars, and also the keypad block while editing, to do most of his things. I would felt significantly slowed down if I was working like he does, but he seems happy. I just spoke about Calc, above. If you are not afraid of learning key sequences, and you sometimes have to do numerical, algebraic, matricial or statistical computations while you edit, this is a really great package to know. It also interfaces nicely with Gnuplot (which has nothing to do with GNU, the name is coincidental). Maybe it does not have mouse menus like Gnus has, but on the other hand, its help system is especially healthy. Many years ago, I used to like solving multiplicative letter puzzles to take a rest between efforts, the goal being of course to avoid loosing points by making unsounded hypotheses. Instead of keeping paper sheets on my side, my habit was to start `M-x mpuz' in one window, and start Calc (`M-# #') in another as a scratch pad. This is how I practiced and got speed on filling and handling matrices, a bit in the spirit of APL :-). -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/