On (properly configured) Unix-like systems, slrn should be able to
determine a valid ``From:'' header line itself. However, you can also set one
explicitly using the following variables in your slrnrc file:
set realname "Your Real Name"
set username "username"
set hostname "your.host.name"
This will cause slrn to generate a ``From:'' header line of the form:
From: Your Real Name <username@your.host.name>
Note: It is possible that your system administrator disabled this feature
to make sure everybody uses his or her correct name and address when posting.
To find out whether this is the case, type slrn --version and look
for strict_from in the feature list. If it is enabled
(indicated by a plus sign), you cannot set your ``From:'' header line
yourself.
First of all, slrn will only attempt to create the ``Message-ID:'' header
line if it was not compiled with the --disable-gen-mid option (check
gen_msgid in the output of slrn --version) and the
generate_message_id config variable has not been set to
``0''.
To create a valid Message-ID, slrn needs to know the fully qualified
domain name (FQDN) of the host it is running on. In most cases, slrn
can find it by querying the system. In case this does not work properly, you
can alternatively set the domain (right-hand) part of your Message-IDs via the
posting_host command. If you think you need this feature,
please read the corresponding entry in the reference manual carefully.
Note: Some Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu) do not provide the option of
giving the system a fully qualified domain name during installation. This can
be fixed by editing the /etc/hosts file. E.g.,
Before:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 desktop
After:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 desktop.your.domain desktop
Unless you ``zoom'' the article pager (using ``z''), slrn will split
the screen and display some article headers at the top. By default, it gives
about 75% of the lines to the article pager, but leaves at least four
lines for the header overview. At runtime, you can change this using
enlarge_article_window (bound to ``^'') and
shrink_article_window (bound to ``CTRL-^'').
There is no config variable you could use to make permanent changes to this; fortunately, it is very easy to set it using a simple S-Lang macro. For example:
define set_size_of_article_pager ()
{
set_article_window_size (int(SCREEN_HEIGHT*0.8));
}
!if (register_hook ("resize_screen_hook", "set_size_of_article_pager"))
message ("Warning: Could not register set_size_of_article_pager" +
" for resize_screen_hook");
would give about 80% of the screen to the pager. If you want the header
overview to have a fixed size, you can use an argument like
SCREEN_HEIGHT-10 instead, which would make it six lines high
(after the command, the article pager has SCREEN_HEIGHT-10
lines; four lines are used by status bars).
As on any other operating system, this depends on the character set your
terminal uses. When using slrn on Windows, two problems connected with
character sets frequently appear:
slrn to convert
between the two character sets to display certain (8bit) characters correctly.
You can enable this by setting the config command charset to use the
appropriate value (all supported character sets are listed in the reference
manual), for example:
charset display "ibm850"
gvim.
In this case, you may want slrn to convert character sets when displaying
messages, but not when calling the editor on them, so you should put a line
like this into your slrnrc file:
charset editor "utf-8"
slrn in windows you need at least slang
2.1.4. You'll have to change the font in the console to a TrueType font
which is capable of displaying utf-8 characters. To active slrn utf-8 mode
you'll have to type one of the following commands in the console:
chcp 65001
set LANG=en_US.UTF-8
You can use the config variable mail_editor_command for this. The following example will use mutt as an external e-mail program for replies:
set mail_editor_command "/usr/bin/mutt -H '%s'"
set mail_editor_is_mua 1
Setting mail_editor_is_mua to 1 tells slrn
not to try and send any e-mail, because the external program used as the e-mail
editor will handle this itself.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The most simple may be that the font that you are using does not support line drawing characters. Simply switching fonts to a dec-vt220 compatible font may solve the problem. This is usually the case with Windows telnet applications.
If you see strings like ``mq>'' or ``tq>'' instead of a thread tree make sure
that your terminal or terminal emulator supports vt100 escape sequences. This
is the case for most emulators like the Linux console, NetBSD's wscons, xterm,
rxvt and others. Set the TERM environment variable to vt100 and start
slrn to see if the thread is drawn correctly. If this isn't the case, you
have to fix your termcap/terminfo file. For termcap based systems, the ``ac'',
``as'' and ``ae'' capabilities have to be set correctly. On terminfo based
systems, the ``acsc'', ``smacs'' and ``rmacs'' capabilities need adjustment.
If you can't solve the problem that way because your terminal setup or your terminal emulator is severely broken, consider setting
set simulate_graphic_chars 1
in your slrnrc file. It restricts slrn to plain ASCII characters for
drawing the tree.
A major drawback of the vt100 solution is, that vt100 terminals can't display
colors. Since most terminal emulators support ANSI colors, you could start
slrn with the ``-C'' command line switch or use the following
configuration command to force the use of colors:
set use_color 1
But if you want to use colors with other programs as well, you need a real solution to this problem. Try the following:
Find a $TERM setting that supports line drawing characters like the vt100
or vt220. Then create a new termcap entry based on that terminal with
additional color capabilities and save it to ~/.termcap. It might
look like this:
myterm:\
:Co#8:NC#3:pa#64:\
:AB=\E[4%dm:AF=\E[3%dm:op=\E[m:\
:mb=\E[5m:md=\E[1m:me=\E[0m:mk=\E[8m:mr=\E[7m:\
:cl=\E[H\E[J:vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[?25h:\
:tc=vt100:
On some systems, you can then set $TERM to 'myterm' and the settings
apply. On others, you need to do something like this:
TERMCAP=$HOME/.termcap
export TERMCAP
eval `tset -s myterm`
slrn?
xterm (and some compatible terminal emulation programs) have a feature
called ``mouse reporting'' that slrn can turn on to support using the
mouse. To enable this whenever the terminal offers it, put
set mouse 1
into your slrnrc file. To force the mouse to be used, startup slrn
using the -m command line option - of course, this will not have the desired
effect if your terminal really does not have this feature ;-)
If you want to know what exactly you can do with the mouse, please see the entry on the variable mouse in the reference manual.
slrn?
There are different ways to do this - chose one:
The easiest way is probably to call a sig rotation program in the
post_editor_command in your slrnrc file. In the
following example, the program fortune is called and its output gets
written to ~/.signature. After that, the editor jed is called:
set post_editor_command "fortune -s > ~/.signature; jed '%s' -g %d -tmp"
If you want to chose the signature depending on the group you are posting to,
you can set the config variable signature using a macro; in the following
example, .signature.german gets selected for all newsgroups in
de.* and .signature.english gets selected for any other group.
Call this macro from post_hook and
article_mode_hook to switch the signature automatically.
define set_signature ()
{
variable signature_file = ".signature.english";
if (0 == strncmp (current_newsgroup(), "de.", 3))
signature_file = ".signature.german";
set_string_variable ("signature", signature_file);
}
If you want more sophisticated per-group settings, we recommend the macro
identity.sl from Emanuele Bassi's slrn page:
<http://www.emmanuelebassi.net/slrn/>.
Note: slrn itself does not have an option to execute a program and
use its output as the signature. Such an option would require piping, which is
not available on all platforms. If you're on a Unix-like system and still want
to use pipes, you can make ~/.signature a named pipe and attach a
daemon sig randomizer to it. Various programs that do this are available on
the net - one example is the program
autosig.