Hugin

The name of the game

Why yet another newsreader?

As the end of our education here at HiST was approaching, we had to do a so-called ``main-assignment'' (norwegian: hovedoppgave). We didn't like any of the assignments we had to choose from, so we made our own, Hugin.

Features

Implemented features:

• Native MIME support.
• Easy FAQ fetching for newsgroups.
• Killfile with kill and select.
• Newsgroup folders.
• Easy to change language (Norwegian and English already made) (and colors too).
• On-line help-system.
• A tree of nodes, where each node is an article in a thread. The tree is built using the articles' references-header.
• Words within *asterisks*, _underscores_ and /slashes/ are displayed using bold, underline and italics (looks really nice :)).
• Different parts of an article are shown in different colors. The possible parts are:
  • Normal text
  • Headers
  • Quoted text (Quotestrings can be specified in the config-file)
  • Signature

Features to come:

• Automatic filtering of messages trough external programs (killfile extension).
• Killfile editing screen.
• More compact threading (collecting equal subjects to ``fix'' what other newsreaders break).
• Recognizing and uncoding uuencode and btoa attachments.
• More speed and less memory usage.
• Automatic detection of URLs and when clicked on, automatic startup of an application specified in the .mailcap-file for that specific type of URL.

Features we would like to add:

• Using several news-sources simultaneously, and not only NNTP.
• Recognizing URLs in message bodies.
• Use Athena(3d) widgets as an alternative to OSF/Motif. (Port it to MS-Windows?)

Screenshots:

• Choosing newsgroups
• Subscribing to new newsgroups
• Browsing the article list
• Reading articles
• Fetching FAQs for newsgroups
• Posting followups
• Netiquette warning when posting
• Attaching MIME-attachments (did I mention that the colors are configurable?)

Current Status

What's missing/needs work

• A way to determine which headers to view, and then a way to view all the headers.
• A way to view a message raw, that is, no decoding of quoted printable, and no interpretation of e.g. multipart MIME messages.
• A way to cancel an article, only your own of course.
• A way to replace one of your articles with a new one. That is, use the Supersedes-header.
• A better config-file.
• The killfile-screen.
• Maybe a config-screen.
• There are currently no short-cut-keys.
• A next-button to get the next unread article, or the next unread article from the next newsgroup if all the articles in the current newsgroup are read.
• A simpler way of specifying where to look for the help-file.
• The helpfiles should probably be more and better.
• Words within underscores are currently displayed in italics rather than underlined.
• Currently, Hugin is only able to detect MIME-attachments, not uuencoded or btoa'ed attachments.
• Use the already made FTP module to retrieve MIME-attachments of type external-part.
• Currently, the articlelist only displays the subject of the ``root-article'' of a thread. The finished version should also display any subject-changes in the thread.

Known bugs

• Global kills don't work.
• The entire config-file is a bug.
• If you select a group from the top-window (that is, in screen number 2), the .newsrc-file will not be updated.
• If you want to be sure the .newsrc-file is updated, exit from the group screen only.
• If there are missing options or wrong optionvalues in the configuration file, Hugin may behave unexpected, use all available memory or simply crash.