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It worked fine. Of course I had to exit slrn and re-enter to get it to re-read the .slrnrc. (Hmm ... I wonder whether there is a command to do that?) Another one that I saw in the web page you (or somebody else) pointed to is one to change the default number of articles in a newsgroup before it asks whether you want to read a subset of the whole. That one also is not in the sample .slrnrc which came with the system. (It is part of the /opt/sfw which is built form the "Software Companion" DVD (used to be CD) of net source programs that someone has compiled for Solaris and added to the package.
Interesting. I wonder why the Software Companion version lacks that? And what I *really* want is to find the Troff source for the full documentation, so I don't have to fire up a web browser whenever I want to read about it. (Hard to carry the browser with me when I head to the john. :-)
I actually started with jove on a BBN C-70, which had a standard unix line editor, and BBN's text editor (for their e-mail mostly) but not a screen based editor like vi. So -- I got the source to jove (spotted mention of it in comp.unix.wizards which I got in digest form then) and compiled it on the system. The administrator of the system then installed it so others could use it too, since I did not have root privileges. Then I got my first unix system at home -- a Cosmos CMS-16/UNX (Motorola 68000 with v7 unix) which also did not have vi, so I compiled jove on it too. As a result, I've never really learned more about vi than what I need for editing jove's configuration files, and for recovering a system which won't boot fully.
But there are things in jove which I particularly like, such as the wrapper to call the system's spell(1) command (which I've modified to include a private dictionary) and the feature to automatically expand acronyms (which I use to automatically correct my most common typos and genuine misspellings. :-)
Yes -- I'm sure that all of that can be done in emacs, using the built-in lisp, but I already know how to use jove for this without having to learn enough lisp to write the equivalent. :-)
Enjoy, DoN.