Frequently-asked questions for trn 4

1. When I try to select text in an xterm, trn treats this as some kind of a command. How can I stop this?

   There are a number of solutions to this. The easiest is to simply remember to press shift while selecting. Alternately, if you start to type a multi-letter command, the mouse will revert to selecting text (so you could type ':' from most anywhere, make a selection, and then press backspace to get rid of the ':').

   However, if you don't like the text-based mouse handling at all, you can turn it off in the options selector (type '&', <Return>, expand "Mouse Options", change the "Use XTerm Mouse" setting, and then 'S'ave your options). This will result in this option changing in your .trn/trnrc file. E.g.:

   >     [options]
   >     Use XTerm Mouse = No

   Also note that the code that figures out the default for the XTerm Mouse Handling is in the INIT file (in the trn library dir), and you can change the default for your whole site by modifying this file. It currently reads:

   >     # Make Use XTerm Mouse default to Yes if this is an xterm or similar
   >     [options] %{TERM}=xterm\\|vs100.*
   >     Use XTerm Mouse = Yes
   >     Auto-View Inline = Yes

2. If I'm in the Newsgroup Selector, how can I subscribe and unsubscribe from groups the way I used to? I miss the old `"====== 11 unread articles in foo.bar -- read now? [+ynq]"` interface!

   You can toggle back and forth between the newsgroup selector and the old newsgroup list by pressing backtick (`) (you can use 'Q' from the newsgroup selector as well).

   A better solution is often to just type a backslash in front of whatever newsgroup command you want to use. For instance, type "\a substring" to add groups, "\g group.name" to go to a specific group, "\o only.groups" to restrict the selector's display, etc.

   If you don't like the Newsgroup Selector at all, you could turn it off via the on-line options (type '&', <Return>, expand the "Selector Options" section, change the "Use Newsgroup Selector" option, and 'S'ave your options).

   Also, if you are feeling really retro, you could remove the trnrc file and put the command-line option "++" into your TRNINIT setup. This will turn off all the new selectors and go back to using the old method of setting options (some people just don't like change).

3. I don't see some of the headers I used to routinely see. How can I see them again?

   If you just want to see them just some of the time, you can use 'v' to display all the article's headers (it displays the whole article in raw form -- both the headers and the body).

   You also have full control over what headers you want to hide since trn now supports the showing and hiding of arbitrary header names (not just the headers that it knows about at compile time). As before there is also the virtual header "unrecognized" which sets the default for all unrecognized headers, however the default is now to hide such headers.

   To change this, either use the option selector to edit the "Header Hiding" option, edit the .trn/trnrc file directly, or use the good-ol' -h/+h options to change what is hidden.

   For instance, to unhide all unrecognized headers, but to hide all X-* headers, you could set this option:

   >     [options]
   >     Header Hiding = !unrecognized,x-

   Note that the headers specified in this option are always considered to be prefixes (which is how the -h/+h options worked), so header x- matches all X-* headers. You can specify exceptions, such as "x-,!x-news,x-news-wasted-space", but if you try to specify something redundant (like "x-news,x-newsreader,x-newsposter"), trn will collapse the list down to a minimal specification ("x-news", in this case).

   Site admins that want to change the default for the header hiding can simply edit the INIT file in trn's library dir. It currently contains this section:

   >     [options]
   >     #Header Hiding = !unrecognized

   ...which some sites may wish to uncomment.