If you're here after learning Picospan somewhere else, things may be
different.  Commands work differently, or have different names. 
But you don't need a complete Picospan tutorial -- Just the differences.
So try asking here, and maybe someone will have an answer. 

32 responses total.

Things I've noticed different from WELL Picospan:

 WELL                        Here
g conf                   join conf
s new                    r new
b new                    s new or b new

And how do you turn word wrap on in responses here? 
And how do you edit previous lines of responses?  On The WELL you have 
commands of the form :s/oldstring/newstring/ but I can't get that to
work here.  Neither does :c to continue the last line seem to work. 

And does this Picospan support hiding responses?  That's different from
scribbling in that the response is still there but just doesn't show. 
You use a special command to see it.  It's often used for stuff like
200-line lists that not everybody will be interested in. 

Another difference:  "items" here are WELL "topics". 

More later when I think of it. 

Just thought of another thing:  Here, a ^Z will log you off instantly. 
I've had that happen when uploading MS-DOS files into a cat >filename.
Is there a way to turn that off?

This response has been erased.

You can also get wordwrap in vi.  set wrapmargin to the number of spaces
you want from the right margin.  (But it doesn't reformat stuff very well;
you pipe your stuff through the Unix fmt command after you make changes.)

Well, Ann Arbor is Picospan's home town, and I'm a home town boy,
so I'm interested in any exotic variations The Well has instituted.
From the description so far, a lot of the differences seem to be
cosmetic -- different terminology (e.g. "topic" instead of "item"),
different names for commands.

I'm curious what substantive differences there are.  From the
discussion so far, it appears that The WELL's text collector
does word wrap.  Any other substantive differences?

Also, I'm curious why the folks at The WELL decided to change
the terminology.  (I actually like "hide" better than "expurgate"
or "censor".)

I'm new enough to The WELL to not know much history, but I could see
"hide" and "scribble" being less ambiguous than "censor".  And since
posters sometimes hide their own responses (if it's something like a
copy of a 500-line Usenet posting not everybody will want to read) perhaps 
"censor" has unwanted connotations. 

And yes, the WELL text collector does word wrap.  There's also a :f command
that formats text, perhaps by piping it through the Unix formatter. 

I would if some long-time cyberspace members might want to get a WELL account
(possibly shared) both to meet new people and to ask about Picospan history.

At the WELL respond prompt, you can enter a number to see responses in
a topic, like here.  But you can also enter o [number] (for only that
response) and see it even if it's hidden.  So hiding something is a
rather thin veil.  And I don't think scribbled stuff is auto-archived. 
If you scribble something, it's Gone (although you might be able to
retrieve it from backup tapes). 

Hosts can hide and scribble and unhide responses, as can whoever posted
them.  (Host = Fairwitness)  The person who started a topic can freeze or
unfreeze it, as can the host.  But hosts can't freeze linked topics. 

There are three categories of conference:  Public, Listed Private, and
Unlisted Private.  Listed Private conferences have info about who to
ask for entry publicly available.  Unlisted ones are word-of-mouth 
(or ASCII equivalent) only.  

There are also a lot of commands that work from PicoSpan prompts that
may not work here, or may be named differently.  These include a 
name-changing command, and others that don't come to mind but which
didn't seem to work here when I tried them. 

And there are two plan files:  .plan and .netplan    .plan can be read
or fingered from within The WELL only.  You can be fingered from the net
if and only if you have a .netplan file.  Thus if you're willing to let
members see your home phone number but don't want it available worldwide
you can put it in your .plan and leave it out of .netplan. 

Your "real life" can can be changed only by emailing support.  The command
to change you name in all conferences is a different beast. 

Most WELL accounts are paid by credit card.  Few plans show mail addresses
and such publicly.  

One command at any Picospan prompt is bio [id].  This seems to call finger,
but without the need for the ! or option switches.  Another command is u
which lists users logged on.  The number seems to vary from almost a hundred
down to half a dozen. 
(Oops, bio may call who)

(grex does have an "only" command that can be issued at teh "respond or
pass?" prompt.

The WELL seems to have put some work into enhancing the text collector.
I take it it's still line oriented and with a ">" prompt?

The "o [number]" command to see a hidden response is not available
here.  You can achieve the same thing in a more cumbersome way
by typing "set noforget" and then the response number.

Fairwitness and author powers of freezing, and probably retiring,
appear to be the same.  Fairwitnesses can't expurgate or scribble
responses, though -- only the author or the conference administrator
(cfadm) can do that.

The .plan and .netplan thing isn't something to do with Picospan.
Sounds like they've made some changes to "finger".

The other things you mention seem to be configuration differences.
Aliases for Unix commands can be defined in Picospan's global cfonce
file.  Actually, you could make Grex's Picospan look very much
like The WELL's Picospan by defining WELL-like aliases in your
.cfonce file.  You could even even change items to topics.

(Steve slipped in.  I think the "only" command here won't show you
an expurgated response.)

I don't think it would be half bad if we had a line-wrapping text collector
like they added at The WELL. I know how easy it is to do it other ways,
but I think it would be an enhancement not to have to.

An enhancement chiefly for the readers, too, not for the writer.
<drools>

John, is there a way for me to define my own aliases within picospan
for unix commands?

This response has been erased.

Re #12:  You bet.  Use the syntax

        define <NAME> 9 "unix <COMMAND>"

where you fill in <NAME> and <COMMAND> with the name and command of
your choice.  (The 9 is a "mask" that determines the class of name
you're defining.  9 is for commands that are to work at both the
"Ok" and "Respond or pass" prompts.  Type "help defcommands" for
more info on masks.)

Examples:

        define roster 9 "unix finger"
        define cafe 9 "unix party"
        define gopher 9 "unix telnet gopher.msu.edu"

Aliases defined this way even accept appended arguments; e.g.

        roster @emunix.emich.edu

would show you who's logged in to emunix.

To make aliases permanent, put them in a file named .cfonce, which
should reside either in your home directory or, if you have one,
a subdirectory of your home directory named .cfdir.

re 14: Why doesn't newuser set up a .cfdir for everyone?

Because it isn't necessary for everyone, and may be confusing to
someone who is just learning about Unix and subdirectories.  It
also chews up an extra block of space and an extra inode (admittedly,
that isn't a lot of space, but it does add up).

I notice that however The WELL collects texts in responses, hitting the
period to post it is always followed by the "OK to post?" prompt.  Could
they be invoking the editor immediately rather than waiting for :e from
the user?

Probably they are, with their own editor (or something they rewrote, it
sounds like).  Here you can achieve the same effect with    set edalways
(precise results will vary with what editor you have defined).

Is there a list of the things you can set in picospan to do stuff like 
having the response headers show how many line a response is? I tried 
!man picospan but it said there was no man page. 

Yes, %s in an rsep definition will display the number of lines.  For
more details, type at the Ok prompt:  "help separators" and "help
itemfunc".

I don't know why there's no man page here for Picospan, but the online
help seems to be pretty complete.

But it's often hard to find what you need.  At some point I found a way to
display *all* the help text, & captured & printed it - but I've lost the
copy & forgotten how I did it.  Browsing through hard copy with a highlighter
was very useful; I learned tons of useful stuff.

There was a man page for PicoSpan on the sun-2 - I don't know why it
didn't get here.

^Z logging Tom off is probably because of what his shell is set to, and
perhaps a poor interaction between the login program and login shells
that don't understand job control.  It probably deserves attention
(control-Z should, in fact, be ignored or treated as data, but shouldn't
log people off.)

The changes to call censor "expurgate", and to limit who can to it, were
primarily to deal with some abuses in the way it had been used on other
systems.  I'm not really sold on the idea of "hidden" text - primarily
because it's not at all clear to me that people really think that way or
that that's the best way to do it.

From the description, I don't think the well actually changed the text
collector that's built into PicoSpan.  I believe, instead, they've added
their own editor that happens to look "much" like PicoSpan's text
collector, but in fact is its own separate program.  That's not a hard
thing to do - in fact, a sufficinetly crafty editor can even get rid of
the "Ok to enter this" prompt by returning certain special error codes
to signal what it wants PicoSpan to do.  There is a downside tho - in
order to do word wrap, the program basically has to do its own editting
- which is more of a load on the system, and not likely to look very
nice over a network connection.  It won't, however, look any worse than
programs such as pico, emacs, or vi.  Actually, the downside is even
worse than that- doing auto-word wrap makes the program unsuiltable for
editting dot files & other useful files.  I think, instead, it's more
useful to have an editor that can justify text, but that doesn't do this
except on demand.

Re #22:  I don't think there was a man page for PicoSpan on the Sun-2
either.  Do you happen to have a spare one lying around that you could
upload, Marcus?  It'd be real handy to have.

#23, word wrap on The WELL can be turned on or off, and defaults off if 
you're coming in via CPN, IIRC.  And I think The WELL has editalways set
and has me set up for red.  They do mention in the manual that Picospan 
calls an editor and that you can change it, IIRC in your .cfonce file. 

As for hidden and scribbled text, I was there before here so I'm more 
used to the way they do it.  Scribbled text is GONE, period (no censored 
file to save to), while hidden text is relatively easy to view.  Thus the
use of hidden text for long responses, etc.  You may see a pseud field
that says "List of Los Angeles Science Fiction fans OK after Quake" and in
the header it says 150 lines, and if you're not interested in L.A. sf
fandom you may be glad it's hidden so you don't have to scroll through it. 
(The word <hidden> shows up like <expurgated and scribbled> does here. 

And the great majority of scribbled responses are by the poster, after a
change of heart, discovery of a meaning-garbling typo, etc.  Scribbling by
mgmt or conf hosts (fairwitnesses) is rare, mainly for stuff like posting
of copyrighted material without permission, other people's passwords or
credit card numbers, etc.  The main exception to this is the weird conf, a
sort of bad-children free-fire zone, where you may see items with titles
like "The Host will scribble responses in this topic on whim". 

Hi, a new arrival from the WELL here. If you knew all the bells and whistles
that have been added to picospan over there, you'd drool. ;-)

I'm a host (fairwitness) there of  several confs. Midwest, and Sweeper. Sweeper
is an offline reader and response editor for the WELL, for use with PCs.

Insteresting.  Is the sweeper software available to others for use
and modification?

I've been interested in trying to find an off-line reader for Picospan for
a year or so.  What machines does it run on?  Does it also handle Email?

Sweeper is by Jim Rutt, and rons under DOS. It handles e-mail, and I'll
that its earlier versions, before some later WELLmods, would work well here.
Email <jstraw@well.sf.ca.us> for more info.
I use to use it all the time, but decided I liked the more real-time
path of responding on-line. But it saves a lot of people a lot of money...
(and helps with system resources!)

Thanks for the pointer.

I do think that lots of "bells and whistles" on the WELL, like hidden
reponses, have to do with the fact that the WELL is a pay-per-hour system,
and people get cranky having to pay to view lists of LA SF Fans, or
whatever, if it doesn't interest them.

There's lots of long-winded (though very interesting) people who post on
the WELL, and a pretty strong local custom of  _attempting_ to keep posts
to a screen or so. 

I think the tension between information and cost drives lots of things on
the WELL.

It is certainly true that whenever the meter is running, one's preferences
are impacted by that fact.

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss