XRN -- an X News reader

What is XRN?

XRN is a program for reading News via NNTP on a UNIX machine which supports the X Window System.

XRN is maintained by Jonathan Kamens.

XRN is compliant with the Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval (GNKSA). Its GNKSA review, which earned it seal number 14, can be viewed here.

Where can I get it?

The master source tree for XRN is on Github. Also, tarballs for new releases are deposited here.

What can it do?

Notable features of XRN include:

What does it look like?

Here are some screen-shots of what a "vanilla" XRN looks like, without any resources configuring its appearance.

Since XRN is a standard X Athena Widgets/Toolkit Intrinsics application, you can use X resources to configure fonts, border widths, colors, key bindings, etc., to make buttons rounded instead of rectangular, etc. Furthermore, if you prefer a "3D" style, you can link XRN against the Xaw3d library.

What can I do to help?

First and foremost, report bugs to me when you find them. If I don't hear about a bug, I can't fix it. Similarly, if you want XRN to do something that it doesn't currently do, please let me know.

Second, I'm always looking for people who are willing to implement new functionality. Note, however, the following caveats:

Finally, one of XRN's major weak points is its documentation. The man page is mostly complete (although parts of it, such as the widget hierarchy, are way out of date), but it's horribly convoluted and difficult to navigate. I'd really like someone to write an XRN manual in HTML, or in some formatting language that can be turned into multiple formats, so that an HTML version of it can be put up on the Web and a man-page version of it can be installed with the program. If you are interested in helping, please contact me.

Where can I find out more?

Contact the maintainer

Correspondence about XRN should be sent to bug-xrn@kamens.brookline.ma.us

Join the xrn-users mailing list

The xrn-users mailing list is a moderated list (I am the only one who sends messages to it) which I use to announce new releases (including beta releases) and to contact XRN users when I need feedback or help from them, for example, when I need to find people using XRN on a specific problem to help me debug a problem on that platform. The volume of traffic on the list is very low. If you are interested in joining, please write to xrn-users-request@kamens.brookline.ma.us.


[GNKSA Seal]Read this page in Belorussian, thanks to Alyona Lompar.

This document was last modified on $Date: 2018/08/23 17:30:08 $.