Re: collapsible hierarchies?

On 7/26/22 6:04 AM, Duncan wrote:
> David Chmelik posted on Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:21:55 -0000 (UTC) as
> excerpted:
>
>> If you look at Thunderbird Mail & News, it does some things better than
>> Pan such as collapsible hierarchies. I use almost 1,000 newsgroups so
>> it'd be helpful if each (sub)category could be collapsible.
> Pan does have a non-obvious feature that you may or may not find useful in
> this regard. Certainly I use it here. But it's not exactly what you
> asked for...
>
> The general feature is this: Pan uses the PAN_HOME environmental variable
> if set, putting its config, data and cache files there (instead of using
> the unset-default ~/.pan2 or whatever directory, I don't even know for
> sure what the default is it has been so long).
>
> I use that via pan wrapper script, with symlinks from my various chosen
> categories (pan.bin, pan.text, pan.test, in my case, but set it up with
> the categories and names you want) to the wrapper script, which then sets
> the PAN_HOME var appropriately before launching the real pan binary.
>
> For config files that I want to share between instances I then use
> symlinks in each instance home dir to the shared location, so I only have
> to edit the common instance to have all the configs change.
>
> That does cut down the number and variety of subscribed groups in each
> instance, but it also means if you want to run all of them at once you're
> multiplying the memory usage (and for long-retention binary groups pan can
> already be a memory hog!), and if they're all using the same servers, you
> of course have to set the number of connections for each instance so as
> not to have the server refusing your additional connections.
>
> But it works great if you tend to focus on one instance at a time, or they
> connect to different servers, or at least if you only run one big binary
> instance at a time, with the rest lower-resource text instances that you
> read and reply to messages with, so you aren't maxing out the connections
> on anyway.
>
> Of course it's also great for keeping your "adult" categories separate
> from the "kids' time" categories, if that's what you want/need to do.
> Just make the "adult" one a script that you have to invoke from the
> commandline, maybe after mounting its PAN_HOME using the root password or
> something or it errors out, while the "kids" one has a menu entry and/or a
> desktop shortcut for it. =:^)

Category collapsibility is a matter of readability/searchability, not 
bandwidth nor hiding nor anything similar.  I read some alt, bit, 
borland, comp, corel, creative, cs, free, geometry, gmane, gnu, gov, 
humanities, ibm, info, linux, list, mailing, mysql, net, news, 
newsreader, nlo, nntpworld, openwatcom, perl, rec, sci, scinet, soc, 
talk, various regional/local groups though usually several/many 
categories at once, sometimes skip a few until catch up. 
Mozilla/Thunderbird allows collapsing every subcategory so is easy to 
search through all fast (though Pan has a search button, not as powerful 
as collapsibility for some cases).  In Thunderbird I've been able to 
look through all interesting areas of Usenet & Gmane and even find many 
interesting categories & groups I wouldn't have otherwise searched for 
so never have found... which wasn't able to do in Pan.  So, if I want to 
look through an entire server (or occasionally read) I use Thunderbird.  
For most reading and now all posting (after accidentally sending an 
email or two to Usenet in earlier decades) I only use Pan.


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