[Pan-devel] Pan 0.92... my first impressions

[Motor]

This is a collection of scribbled thoughts. They aren't meant as
criticisms... just first impressions after using the old-style pan for so
long.

I downloaded and compiled it and it runs OK.

It's nice and clean looking. It seems snappier too.

I don't like the groups list occupying the entire height of the window on
the left. I prefer the old style:

+------------+-------------+
|  GROUPS    | HEADERS     |
+------------+-------------+
|                          |
|                          |
|       ARTICLE            |
|                          |
+--------------------------+

With the article occupying the full width of the window. I also like to
use very small fonts in the groups and article panes. I don't spend a lot
of time looking at the groups and headers panes to I make them small and
use tiny fonts to pack in information -- leaving as much space as possible
for an easy to read article pane with a nice big readable monospace font.
There's no way to set the fonts now.

For some reason the group name seem to be in abbreviated form (r.a.tv for
rec.arts.tv) by default when I started it up. Assuming that's the default
choice, it seems like a bad idea as it's going to confuse newbies.

I prefer my groups to open expanded rather than with the tree hiding most
of the posts. There's no option to set this.

My old score file seems to cause it to crash. I've tracked it down to a
problem with entries using "Xref:". I noticed that someone else mentioned
this, so I'll leave it for now.

Right clicking on a group no longer has an option of "More download
options". I used to use this a lot. I don't follow every group I subscribe
to in detail. Some groups I automatically "download headers and bodies",
others I may only dip into rarely... in those cases, I used to "More
download options" and set the number of downloaded headers to whatever I
was in the mood for, and sometimes download the bodies too. It was nice to
have the choice.

Posting is buried away on a sub-menu Actions->Posting->Post. I doesn't
bother me particularly since it's also available by hitting "P", but
anyone getting started doesn't know that. It seems a bit odd to have so
central a function on a sub-menu.

I haven't got much further, since the XREF: crash makes it unusable at the
moment (I use the Xref a lot for killing stuff crossposted from politics
groups). So I haven't had the opportunity to try out the multiple servers
(sounds nice) and the like. As I said at the beginning. I don't mean this
to sound like criticism. It's just a list of first impressions after using
the old pan for a long time. I'm looking forward to seeing where things
go.