4 ms·
When I started reading Usenet in the 90s, trn (threaded read news) was the state of the art in news readers. It might be worth mining the trn user interface fo
by theoh 7y ago
When I started reading Usenet in the 90s, trn (threaded read news) was the state of the art in news readers.
It might be worth mining the trn user interface for ideas.
The author tried to write a major new version (4) in the late 90s, but from what I could see of the development process (being on a mailing list), the codebase became unmanageable and there were lots of bugs that proved impossible to catch. Usenet was on its last legs by that stage anyway. So that's a cautionary tale: make sure the specification and basic architecture remains clear and clean. (I'm not sure how many of the bugs back then were related to managing ncurses and other fiddly issues that won't arise in the architecture of a web app.)
- u801e 7y agoIn terms of the interface, what did trn have over other newsreaders that were capable of displaying threads?
- theoh 7y agoIt had a mode for selecting threads to read (based on seeing the subject line). Having selected which threads in a particular newsgroup to read, the user would then switch into reading mode. Threads that the user didn't want to read could be "junked". This could work in the context of HN as a way of sorting posts into interesting and not interesting on a per-user basis. Rather than just navigating a set of threads, trn gave the user tools to productively keep up with discussions they were interested in, and not have to worry about other discussions at all (after dismissing those discussions once). Here's a basic explanation of the interface: https://www.einval.com/~steve/software/trn-faq.html https://www.einval.com/~steve/software/trn-faq.html