An Intro from a trn user

Wow for so-many years I've been reading-and-grabbing news from pine-and-trn, but 
neither will adequately handle large binary groups. I installed tin here in 
Debian. As an experiment I loaded alt.binaries.multimedia.documentaries
Since I am on Giganews, we have more than 1100 days of binaries, so I was 
`really pleasantly surprised when tin loaded 8million articles of that group.
Thats the good news. Otherwise, I really don't understand tin nor am I familliar 
with its keystrokes. In examining a tin[5] man-page, it goes through an 
elaborate description of choices I can make. Thats quite good, but on my 
hard-drive, there is no "tinrc" file to edit.
I certainly would love to take `full advantage of threading options and ways of 
either saving articles to a file or piping to uudeview to encode.
Some1 in news.software.readers suggest an editor such as vim which may have 
similarities, however, really an only editor I really understand is nano, since 
I am listening with speech-and-a screen-reader.
So basicly tin seems an only option in Linux to load really large groups. By 
chance are their easy ways of simulating a trn style keymap?
Thanks so much in advance for clarifying these issues.
Hart