The Yarn Wish-List

Welcome to the Yarn Wish-List! On this page, you will find suggestions and comments from Yarn users on how Yarn might be improved upon. For the uninitiated, Yarn is a freeware, offline, text-mode email and news reader written by Chin Huang with very powerful features. Yarn is available for Windows, OS/2 and MSDOS platforms. It is possible that there might be Linux and Java versions of Yarn in the future.

For further information about Yarn, please go to the Official Yarn Page. There you will find links to many goodies about Yarn and the excellent Bells & Whistles Page by Tim Middleton.

One more thing before we go into the list proper, the suggestions on this list have been edited for brevity and continuity. I have tried to do this with a minimum of errors, but, should any contibutor notice any inaccuracy on my part, please do not hesitate to let me know. And for those Yarn users who wish to contribute to this list, please email me with your suggestions (Email address shown at the end of the page).

Without furthur ado, here is the Yarn Wish-List...


From: etus@alarmix.net (Toth Ferenc)

When saving a message to file, yarn should decode the =E5, =F6, etc.
codes (printed qutable encoding)

If 'To' field of a message is in two lines then the reply header
will-be messed up.

Support for accented characters in message headers (eg.
=?iso-8859-2?Q?T=F3th_Ferenc_=28etus=29?= <etus@alarmix.net>)
souplk does that, but a "native" yarn implementation would be nicer

Automatically delete those replies that has been edited. So if I
write a reply but before sending it I modify it then both messages
will be present in the sent mail box.

Support for multiple "sent message" folders.

More complex searches (support for * and ?, able to specify two or
more strings with AND/OR)

no GUI please :) Sometimes I can access only command line
interface...


From: james@sin.not (James Huang)

1. I would like to see the possibility for Yarn to "Save to file" using
   the directory structure as on NNTP-servers, that is, when I press "O"
   to save to folder (taking comp.os.ms-windows.networking.* newsgroups
   as an example) it saves articles from the 'tcpip' newsgroup in the
   'tcpip' file under $HOME\NEWS\COMP\OS\MS-WINDOWS\NETWORKING\ and
   articles from comp.os.ms-windows.networking.win95 in the 'win95'
   file, etc.

   I know that one can press F2 to see a list of 'folders' but having
   Yarn parse the newsgroup name and suggesting that the articles be
   saved in the correct directory structure and file would be a bonus.

   As it is Yarn does not 'see' the sub-directories, just the files in
   the NEWS sub-directory.

   One could 'Save to file' but then typing in the whole directory
   structure would be a pain as Yarn does nat have the 'F2' option
   implemented for 'Save to file'.

   I believe that implementation of my suggestion would make storage and
   retrieval of 'pearls of wisdom' from the newsgroups much easier.

2. The possibility to open another window with Yarn running in a
   read-only mode so that one can search for articles from time long
   gone or earlier in a thread to cut-n-paste into a reply or follow-up.

   This was suggested earlier but never implemented. That feature was
   available in a qwk reader from BBS days called M-Reader by Kip
   Compton designed for RIME members.

Looking forward to seeing the list and hoping that someone can do
something about the wishes which are put forward.


From: d96-mst-ingen-reklam@nada.kth.se (Mikael StÕldal)

 1. There are some bugs with handling of hi-bit(High ASCII)characters.
 Such as in signatures (see mine below).

 2. Support for MIME header encoding/decoding.

 3. The useful features of YES and Yarf should be integrated into Yarn.
 Especially I would like to be able to easily change between different From:
 addresses (mostly for selective anit-spam).


From: dpleic@open.hr (Denis Pleic)

My first and foremost wish regarding Yarn is (and has been for some
time) to see it ported to Linux.

Or, if that's not feasible (too time-consuming), why not distribute it
under GPL GNU license? It's freeware, anyway, right?

And, since we're at it, maybe Chin would agree for somebody else to
port it to Linux?


From: Richard Steiner <rsteiner@skypoint.com>

(Refer to previous post)
Yes!!!!!  I've asked Chin about this before and gotten no response, but I
would VERY much like to see Yarn available for Linux.  I think it could
become a very popular newsreader there -- some readers like slrn provide
good offline capabilities, but I vastly prefer Yarn to slrn.

Perhaps more important would be a port of something like VSoup or Souper
to Linux.  I know uqwk exists, but last time I tried to compile uqwk 1.8
all it would do is dump core.


From: Anssi Saari <as@cs.tut.fi>

An old wish of mine is default save folders for each newsgroup.


From: "Lemire David" <lemire_david@bah.com>

My wish list item for YARN is to have the sort order for display of
folders/groups stored on a folder/group basis.  Generally speaking, I
think the e-mail inbox is best shown on a time basis (arrival order),
but I prefer newsgroups threaded.  It'd be nice to have each
folder/group have it's own setting, with changes saved on a persistent
basis.


From: theo@ccnet3.ccnet.com

The ability to select or mark articles for further processing. Thus,
a set of selected articles could be read (as in nn, trn), or 
importantly saved to a file or folder as a group, printed, etc.


From: Martin Hunt <martinh@islandnet.com>

Ah, I've been a happy YARN user for years, merrily posting
an emailing using it tens of thousand of times. It is as
near perfect as newsreaders get (believe me, I've tried them
all), but I do have a couple wishes:

1. Follow-ups beginning with Re: should display the Re: in the
Subject: line of the article selection list. (I like to fish for
new posts and dodge aging threads, but it's hard without that Re: 
...)

2. I desperately need to find some editor that a) has the ability
to include files right off the HD, and b) has no limit on size.
DOS Edit under YARN limits to about 270kb or so (with 620kb memory
free of the memory that counts), and Easy Writer limits to about 
220kb, but does allow include (and a spellchecker, but who needs
it?) Could future releases of YARN include a very simple editor
that fits these parameters? It's a bitch cutting up one meg files
into 4 sections, only to find I can't load 'em without "out of
memory" popping up...

BTW, the earlier suggestion on including YES is a damn fine idea;
very handy have rotating selectable .sig files. :-)


From: Lou Verdon <lverdon@julian.uwo.ca>

This is my second wish.

The majority of the groups and lists that I read with my favorite
newsreader (Yarn) frequently offer ascii drawings, poorly formatted
binary attachments, and html links to graphics on the web.

I know that it would be a challenge, but I would like to see Yarn link,
perhaps with a mouse click, from a URL reference in the document being
read to a news base of binary files either on the web or in a
conventional news group or both.  This function could also be set up to 
sniff the URL's from the text by invoking a function key as F5 for
instance.  This would mean that conventional lists would require either
a URL [or even a CGI server] that contained all of the graphics files,
or a second binary companion to the original group or list.  Perhaps the
URL request could be handled first by a local surrogate server on the
same machine, and if not found there, searched on the web.  Graphics,
once retrieved, could then be added to the local newsbase on the
surrogate server (and deleted along with the calling message when no
longer needed.)

I would not even care if Yarn were left untouched except by the deft
hand of an experienced meddleton ;) for this auxiliary function.  It
would require Chin to build hooks for him to work with, however, I
think...

My first wish is that Chin would accept some monetary token of
appreciation from the users of the very best newsreader there is.
(...to keep it at the top, where it ought to be.)


Most recent revision: 
December 1, 1997
Copyright © 1997 , Douglas Tan.
All Rights Reserved.

Email: dougtan@SPAAM.softhome.net
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