How do I: 
  1. Get a list of conferences I have joined?
  2. View Items and new stuff without seeing the 100-1000 responces that
     were entered before I joined?

38 responses total.

1. read the file .cflist in your directory.
2. enter the command    fixseen   at an Ok: prompt. You can then enter
   the command   read since 3/15/99  and those responses will be new
   again (for example).

 ".cflist: No such file or directory"

Create the file .cflist, and put in it in a column the names of the
cfs would like to proceed to in order, after you start picospan.

 Bringing us back to the original quextion:  How do I get a list
 of the conferences I've joined?

Try the following:
ls -1 .*.cf .cfdir/.*.cf
One of these templates (probably .cfdir/.*.cf) is likely to give you
an error message; just ignore it.  The .*.cf files are your conference
participation files.  (If you want to collect them all, along with a few other
Picospan-related files, in a directory called .cfdir, Picospan will figure
out that you've done this, & it keeps them separate from everything else.
If you don't know about this, you probably don't have a .cfdir.)

Note that all those dots are necessary ...

To jump back to what Rane was talking about:  to create a .cflist file,
just enter     set list   and then enter a list of conference names.  Next
time you run Picospan, it will come up in the first of these, and entering
the command    next    will take you to the next one with new activity
(according to Picospan's definition of "new activity"), skipping past any with
no new activity.  The improvement in conferencing is much greater than it
sounds.

prp doesn't have a .cfdir, so the second template is not necessary. It
might also be more obvious to just list the directory with ls -al, and
read the .*.cf files, where * is the name of the cf. 

You can also create a .cflist with   pico .cflist    pico is a simple
editor, with menus.

 
Pico doesn't really work with my terminal program and Grex's termcap file.
I'm working on this, but for now I cann't edit anything.
 
"set list" worked very well.
 
Next question: If an item is linked into two conferences I've joined, is
there anyway to stop seeing everything twice.  What with the line dropping
all the time, I'm seeing enough stuff over and over again.

The command   forget   at a Respond or pass prompt will forget that item
in that cf, but leave the same item in other cfs intact.

        Yeah: 1) it's both sides.. 

        A) Some telnet programs ae flat out stupid about wtf a keyboard
           looks like;
        B) Occasionally, grex/mnut/<yer favorite telnet site> gets stupid
           and you must manually tweak yer .login - other times, you can
           punch in !reset and get some action..

        (you milage may vary)

Making prograss.  "cat whatever" copies a file to the terminal.  How do I
copy a file from the terminal?

The file isn't on the terminal, its in a file. Do you mean, something
like copy a highlighted selection to a file? That's a function of your
comm program. 

At a guess, he means from the keyboard and/or emulating keyboard input using
cut-and-paste through his comm program, Rane.

Paul, if that's the case, cat is still the command.  "cat > filename" will
copy your input to the file called filename, overwriting any existing file
with that name.  "cat >> filename" will append to any existing file.

In either case, you need to know your end-of-file character, and type it
to terminate the cat command.  The default is control-D, but you might have
it set to something else.  (To make sure, use the command "stty -a"
and look for the setting for "eof" among about 10 lines of various
settings.)

More questions: 

"help" suggests topics "dates" and "summary".

  --  "help dates" doesn't work.  Who broke what?
  --  "help summary" goes on forever.  Is it really supposed to do that?
 
How does one find out which conference a linked item is from? 
 
How does one create a linked item? 

Any way to check the spelling other than ":e", which invokes all of Pine?
 
Any way to set things up so that the delete key works right in Pine?
There must be, since it does on M-Net; there the arrow keys don't work.

How does one get Pico span to use the .Cf directory?

Any way to have Picospan pause after printing each response?

There are indeed some broken things in Picospan help.  I posted some I found,
or emailed staff, when I was new here (back in 1992).  <**SIGH**>

I think that help summary is supposed to have all that stuff, yes.  It's very
useful, but you're right, it is endless.

Linked items are created normally, in one conference, then linked into another
conference by the fairwitness of that second conference.  cfadm also can link
items, I think, but by policy normally doesn't; the policy is to leave such
things up to the FW, unless there's a pretty outstanding reason.  (There's
a list somewhere of commands reserved for FWs.)

For the speller, try :spell at the beginning of a line.  (That's assuming that
you're set up using gate as the text collector, but this has been the default
now for a couple of years or so.)

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "How does one get Pico span to use the
.Cf directory?".  If you set up a directory called .cfdir, and put in it your
.cfonce and all your .*.cf files and your .cflist, then Picospan will find
them there and use that directory for participation files for any new cfs you
join.  Is that what you meant?

I don't use pine, & have no idea on that one.  Sorry.

The way linking is implemented, it's not easy to find out what 
conferences a linked item is linked to; that information isn't stored 
in a central location.

I don't use pine either, so I can only speculate on the delete key 
problem. Perhaps Grex and M-Net run different versions of pine. I 
suspect, though, that the problem isn't with pine itself but rather 
that Grex and M-Net have different notions of what your "erase" 
character is. It's usually either control-h (ascii 8 decimal, also 
known as "backspace", or it's control-? (ascii 127, also known as 
"rubout" or "del"). If your delete key sends the code that the host 
thinks is your erase character, then it tends to work correctly in all 
applications. If not, then it won't.

Your erase character is configurable. You can type the command "stty 
-a" to find out what your erase character is set to, and then the 
command "stty erase '^h'" or "stty erase '^?'" to change it to 
backspace or rubout, respectively. You might try experimenting with 
that to see if it fixes the problem.

pine is an e-mail client. The editor is pico (no relation to Picospan).
They have similar origins and interfaces, of course. There are other
editors if you don't like pico.

Oh, yes, forgot that one.  As John says, there's no easy way to find out what
other conference an item's linked to.  Here's a way to do it, though, if you
really care:  ls has an option to list the inode number of a file.  Conference
items are in directories under /bbs; the filenames begin with a leading
underscore, followed by the item #.  Once you know the inode #, find has an
option to search for files by inode #.  (At least, this is true of SysV ls
and find.  I haven't ever used either of these features on Grex.)  As I say,
this is not a *good* way to find out where an item's linked, but there it is.

Also broken in the PicoSpan help file, Browse: 
 
     Browse will print just the header to items -- the item #,
     date entered, author and header.  ...
 
When I use browse, there is no date nor author listed.  So, 
how do I tell PicoSpan to do it the way it says it will?

Summary not only goes on forever, it's gibberish.  "%(s    you are
in a conference" and such.
 
:spell only works with Edalways on, which it is now.
 
:edit then invokes Pico which is great, but I have no idea why, as
Editor is set to Gate.
 
Oops I tried .cf instead of .cfdir.  What is the Unix command to 
rename a file?  Silly me, I tried rename. 

re 16: 
My .login has "stty rows 34".  That's fine for the backspace key, 08,
x08, erase, or ^H, whatever you choose to call it.  The problem is
with the Delete key, 127, x7F, rubout, or ^?.  Somehow it is being
adulterated before making it all the way to pine.

re 17:
I like Pico well enough, the big problem is that it is running on
a remote host, but that's not Pico's fault.

re 18:
I don't want a list of all the conferences an item is linked to,
I just want to find out which conference it is linked from.  Pico
Span ought to be able to do this.  It prints "<linked Item> and
finds the text from the original conference.  Couldn't it just
say "<linked from Coop>" or whatever? 

No.  It implements linked items as Unix hard links - 2 directory entries for
a single file (or more than 2, obviously).  Once the second directory entry
is created, there's no difference between them.  The system tracks how many
links (directory entries) a file has, and Picospan just checks whether this
number is greater than 1.  The reason Unix works this way is that if you
remove a link (dir entry) it has to know whether it's all right to throw away
the data as well as the link.  (See man ln and experiment on a file in your
home directory, if you want to find out how it works.)  But Picospan does
*not* "find the text from the original conference" except at the time the
fairwitness links it ... and then it's not the *text* it finds.

To rename a file, the command is mv (for "move" - it also will move it from
one location to another).  From Picospan you might have to prepend a bang.

You have two different editor settings.  There's Picospan's setting, set by
a "define editor gate" command either in your own .cfonce file or in some
global Picospan config file, and there's the Unix EDITOR environment variable.
Picospan uses the former, gate uses the latter.

In gate you can invoke the editor (pico, for you) with just ":" at the
beginning of a line, BTW; no need to type all of ":edit".

If you don't set edalways, you use Picospan's builtin text collector, not
gate.  gate is much enhanced, allowing wordwrap etc. to work well, as well
as things like :spell.

As it turns out, I have only one set/define EDITOR command, and
it's in .cfonce.  I got rid of the rest tring to figure out what
was going on.  I think this means that ":edit" given to gate 
invokes Pico.

Anyway to define a macro with parameters?  If not, anyway to do:

     item {n} noresp
     -1

with less typing?

where does one find picospan source ?

One doesn't. It's proprietary software.

Within Picospan the command "!ls ~prp" ; it produces "ls: ~prp: No 
such file or directory".  I've figured out that the cause is that 
"~prp" doesn't get expanded.

The question is: Is there anyway to make it work?  Short of: 
  !
  ls ~prp
  exit

        <shrug> Works for me - on me.. Yer dirs are permed as unreadable,
        chief. Ergo, I couldn't comment on yer personal prob.

Works for me, too.  It may depend on your shell.  sh doesn't support the ~
syntax; if Picospan is, for some reason, passing your bang commands to sh,
that would explain the error.  But why *that* would be, I don't know.

According to /etc/passwd, you use bash as your shell.  You might check your
.profile & .bashrc files, as well as your .cfdir/.cfonce file.

Problem was "define shell /bin/sh" in my .cfonce file, which it
inherited from /bbs/rc.  This leads to some questions: 
 
Why doesn't this affect almost everyone?
 
Why is it in /bbs/rc if it doesn't do anything?

Hmm.  I kind of doubt that it got into your .cfonce from /bbs/rc.  I'd guess
it's in /bbs/rc to prevent people from trying to do shell escapes if they
don't have any shell defined at all, but I could be wrong.  Did you possibly
originally set up using sh, and then change your shell?  Just speculating here
...

No, I copied /bbs/rc, then deleted most of it, so that "dis macro" 
would fit on one screen.

I think I was trying to get bsep to tell me how many new responses
an item had.  Still haven't gotten that to work.  Anyone know how?

well, I joined this conf and got this:

<snip>
1 newresponse item
First item 1, last 325

Cmd? r
Item #316 entered Mon, 15 Mar 1999 (20:02:04)
        by Paul R Pickelmann (prp) [uid 30681]
        PicoSpan Questions 1 and 2 [4 lines]
<<nsep (new responses)>>
#316.35/35
        Mon, 31 Jan 2000(16:44:07)
        by (prp) [uid 33725] [6 lines]
<snip>
Is that what you are looking for? 

No, I'd like "browse new" to tell me how many new responses an item has
instead of, or in addition to, how many total responses it has.

<shrug> Yer on Yer Own, Kemosabe - pack extra water..

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