The most commonly used Unix newsreaders are pine, nn, tin, and trn.
Each of these has many ardent fans and the choice between them
depends on your news reading needs.

  News reading Power    Newsreader
  ==================    ==========
  low                   pine
  medium                tin
  high                  nn and trn


If you are just getting started with news, and you already use pine
for mail, then pine is the easiest way to start reading and
participating in news.  With pine, you'll be able to use your
familiar mail commands to go to a newsgroup and find, select, read,
flag, save, and respond to news articles.

If you want something more powerful than pine, and you don't think
you are going to want to evolve into a power news user, then tin is a
good choice because its interface is pretty easy to learn.

But, if you want to be a power news user then either trn or nn is the
way to go.  Both nn and trn are powerful, customizable newsreaders
that have evolved over many years.  Neither one is clearly better
than the other.  Here are some of the differences:


Notation
========
+ is an advantage
o is neutral
- is a disadvantage
? is something I don't know about

TRN
===
+ Contains a superset of RN commands so it's an easy migration for RN
  users.
+ newsgroup selection level is friendlier than nn's A/B (advance/back) and
  N/P (next/previous) commands (I like being able to see the list of
  newsgroups that I say no to)
+ true threading (uses References line)
+ graphic view of thread ("article tree")
+ can search the full headers of articles in a newsgroup
+ can reorder subscription list from within TRN (using m)
+ can have macro names longer than 2 characters
+ active participation by trn developer in newsgroup
  (news.software.readers)
+ can reverse the sort order (e.g., most recent at the top)
+ intrinsic commands for going to root/leaf of a thread (in nn you
  need to do this with macros or a sequence of commands)
+ intrinsic command for auto-selecting your articles
+ easy to change attribution line to whatever you want (using ATTRIBUTION
  environment variable)
+ when you post you get lots of blank headers (e.g., Followup-To) put
  into your editor
o newsgroup (news.software.readers) for discussion but also contains lots
  of non-TRN discussion.
- harder macro language


NN
==
+ virtual newsgroups - result of subject, author, or full text search
+ easier macro language
+ more powerful kill/select abilities (ANDing, ORing)
+ faster auto killing/selecting
+ can split/unsplit a digest
+ dedicated newsgroup (news.software.nn) for discussion
+ Commands for flagging (l and L) and leaving an article to deal with it later
  (this is better than trn's M command which just returns an article as unread
  next time)
+ built-in command for mailing a copy of a followup article to the author you're
  responding to (in trn you need to type the person's email address)
+ can easily mail articles you read/post to other addresses
+ incredibly customizable
+ can easily view and organize your folders (both mail and news) with nn
+ can merge newsgroups
+ can search all (or some) newsgroups for subject and/or author
+ can set default save directory for each newsgroup that is not necessarily
  one of the interpreted strings (e.g., my default save dir for comp.editors
  is +vi)
- not very active participation by developer(s) in newsgroup
  (news.software.nn)
- can only search on subject, author, or full text; also author is the
  "real name" rather than full From line
- macro names limited to 2 characters (as far as I can tell)
? more powerful macro language than trn


[Please send more comparisons.]

NN Testimonials
===============
*  Ron Dippold, who handles most newsgroup voting, says that nn is the
   "best Usenet group reader on the planet."

*  Despite years of power rn experience and some trn experience,
   and many finely crafted [t]rn macros, I (nancym@ii.com) switched
   to nn because of many of the features listed above.

*  [Please send me your NN Testimonial!]


Fortunately, all these newsreaders (and many others) use the .newsrc
file to track which articles you've read (or marked read), so you can
try out all these newsreaders and not have to reread any articles
you've already read.

Some parts © 2009 Advameg, Inc.