Ask HN: Best command line Usenet clients? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best command line Usenet clients?

3 pointsSamWhited10 comments

Any suggestions for good CLI usenet clients? I currently use Thunderbird for Usenet, but 90% of my other activites are performed on the command line (IRC, web browsing, XMPP, etc.)

I may end up moving my email to a command line system as well, so if you have a favorite email+usenet client that works too, but simplicity is more important. Working well with tmux is a plus. Binary support is not a necessity, but would be nice. Also, as a matter of personal preference, Vim-like is better than Emacs-like.

View on HN

I used to use elm, and pine. alpine is pine's modern incarnation. I think alpine probably rivals mutt for rabid fan enthusiasm. I've used both and prefer alpine. It does usenet too.

https://www.washington.edu/alpine/faq/whatis.html#2.1.1

alpine, via pine (and imap) has very respectable parentage: https://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/credits.html

Thanks, I'll check that out; I've heard of Pine (mainly from using Pico for a while before learning Vim), but forgot the two went together. There are some great names on that list, so hopefully it's good!

I'm a big fan of Gnus, which is written in elisp and runs in emacs. It also supports email very nicely.

Doesn't fit your vim-like request, but it does enable living on the command line (particularly because one can start up emacs and not leave, and can run emacs in a GUI when necessary, with the exact same interface).

If I needed a CLI netnews client, I'd use trn, threaded rn (read news). It worked fine 20 years ago, I'm sure it'd work today.

Wow, I haven't used trn in years; completely forgot about it. Thanks!

You are welcome! :)

http://slrn.sourceforge.net/

It's old-school of me, but I still rather like trn.

I might prefer nn if I hadn't already learned trn.

Thanks; I overlooked this post somehow. I may give trn another shot.

slrn is nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com