[3480] in SIPB bug reports
Some suggestions from a user here
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Mon Feb 1 11:24:04 1993
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 93 11:23:31 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: xrn@ic.berkeley.edu
Cc: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
A user here recently sent us three suggestions about xrn:
>1) It would be nice if help were easily obtianed from within XRN.. Esp. for
> ambiguous or complex operations. (I know, subjective. But, thats the point)
>
>2) a CASE INSENSITIVE way of doing searches- spec: in read-a-group mode,
> being able to search the subj. headers and catch, as an example,
> `LAPTOP FOR SALE', `Laptop for sale', and the lazy `laptop' all with
> one search would be nice. Also, a way to do compound searches (or
> if thee is one, more obvious)
>
>3) A way to search in newsgroups mode. ie: i may not know what all of the
> forsale groups are, and having a search feature would find all of
> them without my having to waste wetware cycles doing a manual or
> out-of-xrn search.
I guess what he's asking for in (1) is context-sensitive help that's
more detailed than the one-line summaries. That would be nice, but it
would also require quite a bit of work (a minimal amount of work to
get the help working in code, and a larger amount of work to format
all the help text and pointers to it).
(2) is already possible, using regular expressions with [] in them,
and I guess it's not going to get easier than that unless the regexp
routines are modified to support case-insensitive searches, which is
unlikely.
(3) Isn't possible in newsgroups mode, but is possible in "all groups"
mode, using ^S.
--> Jonathan Kamens
Athena volunteer user consultant
Member, Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU
