As an addendum to my post about Keeping track of mailing lists, despite everybody’s suggestions about using Gmail, I’ve decided to try using Gnus in XEmacs again. Last night, I built 21.5.26 with Andrew Choi’s carbon patches, installed the latest sumo packages and tried it out.

My fingers strangely still remember a number of the shortcuts, so it wasn’t an altogether painful experience. In fact, my fingers still remember a bunch of the stuff I’d set up myself, that I miss, so I’m now digging through my subversion-backed home directory’s history to find my old gnus configuration.

I feel it helps to have a separate application for mailing lists, because it is very much a separate task (or context?) to reading email. It’s something I only want to do once or twice a day, when I’ve got a little downtime or am looking for a distraction.

Incidentally, I previously built a binary for XEmacs and now that I’m using it again, I’d be happy to knock a more up to date one together if there was any demand for such a thing?

One other thing. I don’t suppose anybody around here still happens to run a usenet news server these days? I’d like access to comp.lang.ruby and I’d quite like to reacquaint myself with another couple of groups I used to hang around in…

update And this is why one keeps one’s home directory in subversion:

mathie@Lagavulin:mathie$ svn log -v|less

to discover in which revision I removed the XEmacs configuration, then:

mathie@Lagavulin:mathie$ svn merge -r1358:1357 .

and it restores all my config. OK, so there are a couple of conflicts to resolve, but that was really quite painless.