On Wed, 19 May 2021, klu wrote:
Hi does anyone use alpine for news group?
I do; although I can't say that I'm well-versed.
How to mark all as read for a group?
Under Alpine, Netnews' action of "mark-as-dealt-with" is handled
by deletion function. The behavior is also a bit different from Alpine's
email deletion, as you don't need to e(X)punge to actually apply
the "deletion" (although you could still do that if you desire
immediate effect). Namely, you can just mark (D)elete, and once you left
the newsgroup, the message will be "gone".
To _manually_ mark *all* messages in current newsgroup as dealt-with,
you can use Select command (press `;`), and press `a` (select-all);
then use (A)pply command (press `a`), and press `d` (delete).
Once done, you would see `D` mark near the beginning of each line;
and if you exited the newsgroup and re-enter it, the messages would be gone.
(Note that the internal mechanism Alpine used for keeping the "deleted"
message out of view is the e(X)clude function; which it means you can
press `&` to temporarily un-exclude and read the old messages too,
and you may use select-apply combo to "undelete" those messages
to make them visible in normal view again)
However...
For people who USENET the old way, where catch-up command
(newsgroup-wide mark-as-dealt-with) is used regularly, the above
may be considered time-consuming; and something more automatic
would be more desirable:
To enable newsgroups-wide automatic catch-up (with confirmation prompt)
in Alpine; from main menu, go to (S)etup > (C)onfig, then type `w`
to start searching, followed by `catchup` and press Enter.
Your cursor would end up on the following item under "News Preferences" section:
[ ] News Offers Catchup on Close
Press `x` to enable that setting, and press `e` followed by `y`
to save and return to main menu.
Then, if you have visited any non-empty newsgroups in Alpine session,
when you exited one newsgroup and about to enter another newsgroup
(or if you pressed `q` to quit and confirmed quitting) you would be greeted with a prompt like this:
Delete all NNN messages from "that.newsgroup"?
Y [Yes]
N No
Which answering `y` will update your `~/.newsrc` to flag all messages
in that newsgroup as "dealt-with", i.e. catch up. (Which those messages
would no longer show up your newsgroups) [1]
And this marks the end of my "Today I Learned" episode.
Regards,
~xwindows
[1] To un-catchup, see my comment above regarding `&` (un-exclude) command.
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