| What's new around here? The new site is http://www.vex.net/~x/yirx/ | 
| There is a guestbook if you'd care to sign. |
| What's new around here? The new site is http://www.vex.net/~x/yirx/ |
| There is a guestbook if you'd care to sign. |
| Introduction To Yarn and... | |
|---|---|
| This Site | Other Sites |
Yarn is a multi-platform off-line internet email and usenet news reader. Yarn is currently available for OS/2, DOS, and Win32/95/NT. Yarn has a text based interface, not a GUI. Yarn may be plain to look at, but it is very fast, extremely flexible, and thoroughly reliable.
Yarn is suitable for use with SLIP/PPP internet accounts as well as UNIX shell accounts. Yarn uses SOUP (Simple Offline Usenet Packet) format packets to transfer mail/news. If you want to pick up mail via SLIP or PPP you will need to use Souper or Vsoup. If you want to pick up mail/news from a unix shell you will need to use Uqwk installed on the host system.
Yarn maintains a local database of mail/news you have downloaded. Some of the advanced functions Yarn is capable of are:
If you are a DOS/Win user you may want to search this page for the word "DOS" to find the DOS compatable gems hiddden in this field of wild and rampant OS/2 weeds. Or just switch to a stable operating system, like OS/2. (Just kidding! Sort of. Heheh.)
This site was inspired by Kevin Martin's Yarn Bells & Whistles web page. It is a wonderful page, but alas was/is DOS/Windows oriented. But thanks to his original work, now there is a similar web site dedicated to OS/2 Yarn users. And this is it!
If you know of any OS/2 Yarn related software/scripts that should be
here please let me know. If you have any
tips about using any software with yarn, which you think would be
helpful to others, then please share that as well. If you have, or know of,
any other web sites with Yarn (especially OS/2) related paraphenalia on
them, send them over to be linked.
All for one, and one for all, and all that!
| Text Editors | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Emacs | EPM | FTE | Other |
Everyone, of course, has their own perferences when it comes to text
editors. The purpose of this section is catalogue suggestions and tips
about using various text editors with Yarn/2. By all means, if you
especially like a text editor that is not listed here (and especially if
you have any special configuration tips for using it best with yarn),
don't keep quiet.
Emacs 19.33 is a freeware UNIX text editor that has been ported to many platforms, including OS/2. It can an extremely complex editor, practically an operating system itself!
I don't use Emacs, however I'm given to understand it has an "email
mode". This mode apparently works well with Yarn and
Yep. If anyone has details, let me know.
EPM is, of course, the "enhanced" editor that ships with OS/2. It's quite a good PM editor. It seems that to use it with yarn however you must call it from a command shell. So the editor defintion in your yarn %HOME%\yarn\config file would look like this:
editor=cmd /c epm %fOr if you use Yep then the definition in your yep config might look like this:
editor="epm $F 'goto $L'"There is a great spell checker add-on for epm, which is well worth downloading and installing!
The is my choice of a text editor. It has a text mode, as well as PM version. It is freeware and extremely configurable. It has a nice colour syntax email mode (a different colour for header, quoted, body, and sig) which is very easy on the eyes. Once you've experienced it it's hard to give up!
Another great thing about the full screen text version of FTE is that it is able to access and use the system clipboard (just make sure you run the CLIPSERV.EXE utility bundled with FTE first -- put it in your startup folder, or put RUN=c:\path\CLIPSERV.EXE in your config.sys if you use it often. (Or you can also run it from an OS/2 startup.cmd -- OS/2 is so darn flexible)
I used to have a bunch of customisations here for FTE to get it to work better with Yarn and YEP. However, in later versions Marko (the author of FTE) made these the editor's default settings -- so not many changes are needed!
However, FTE is particularly wonderful if you change the MSG mode colours to match your Yarn colour scheme -- it makes FTE seems almost seemless with Yarn... when you reply to messages you see them in the editor the same colour as you view them in yarn.
The fastest way to change the colours in fte MSG mode is to edit the m_msg.fte config file. However if you are going to make many changes, the best approach is to create your own config file (this way, when new versions of FTE come out you don't need to edit FTE's config files every time).
For this example you should create a file in the FTE config directory called myfte.fte and put this in it:
colorize MSG {
SyntaxParser = 'MSG';
color {
{ 'Normal', '-2' },
{ 'Header', '-3' },
{ 'Quotes', '-6' },
{ 'Tag', '-F' },
{ 'Control', '-B' },
};
}
Note: the above mysterious looking code is copied straight out of the
m_msg.fte FTE config file, but the colours values have been
changed to match Yarn's default colours. Each colour is a two digit
hexadecimal number (ie. from 0-9 and A-F). The first digit is the
background colour (if you use '-' instead of a digit (as above) then no
background colour is set. The second digit is the IBM character colour.
Now, assuming you have put this configuration code in a file called myfte.fte you need to inform FTE to use your added configuration. You do this by editing the main.fte FTE config file. At the bottom of it (ie. the last line), include a line which looks like this:
include 'myfte.fte';And then re-compile your fte.cnf and/or ftepm.cnf configuration file as usual, using the cfte compiler (cfte config/main.fte fte.cnf). In this way, if you put all your configuration changes to fte settings and modes (except the PLAIN mode, which is a special case) in this seperate file, then when you upgrade FTE in the future you usually will only ever need to add the "include" line in your new main.fte, and compile the cnf file and you are ready to go.
Here are some sample files:
What? You want yet more old FTE tips??
Put information on using your favorite editor with Yarn/Yep here! For
example, does anyone know the command line for Qedit to set the starting
line number (for use with Yep)?
| Editor Enhancements | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Spellers | Yarf | YEP | Other |
Want to polish up that message text? Streamline your editing process?
Add customised message headers? Automate some of your text processing?
Some of these utilities might be useful.
GNU iSpell is a free spell checker ported to OS/2. I should warn you, it's a rather ugly program! And the last time I looked it wasn't exactly a piece of cake to set up either. However, it works, and once you do get it setup it is a piece of cake to integrate it into Yarn. You can read how in the CHANGES text file that is with any version of Yarn newer than version 0.55. In a nutshell, all you need to do is edit your yarn CONFIG file, adding a line something like this:
spell=iSpell %f
If anyone using iSpell would like to write a short tutorial on how to install it (hashing dictionaries, and so on) and hook it into Yarn, please do! Then send it to me to post here, or a link to a page where you post it. (I have been told this program requires HPFS).
Other Speller Checkers you might want to check out include:
Yarf 1.5 allows your "From:" message
header to be modified automatically based on many user definable
cirteria. You might want to use a different "name").
> in certain usenet
newsgroups. You might have several email addresses and want to change
which email address appears on the message you are writing. You may
want a way to obscure your identity in some usenet newsgroups. Yarf
lets you do all this, and with some imagination more. (OS/2 and DOS
versions.
br>
YEP 1.7 is a utility that can be used to enhance and automate editing messages with your text editor. It is similar in some ways to, and was inspired by, the more famous DOS Yarn Editor Shell). > (YES, of which it is rumoured there is an OS/2 version in the works), but has it's own peculiarities. It can be used to set the position of your cursor when you enter your editor, insert customized message headers, do random SIGs, insert text based on newsgroup, to, date or subject; insert output from external programs on the fly. Yep uses substitution codes to create customized macros, abbreviations or spelling corrections. And more. (OS/2 only. !--
A newer beta version of YEP is available, but
may still have some bugs. -->
Know of any other utilities related to your message text editing/processing.
Of course there is encypption, but I have left that for a general
encoding/decoding section of this document. But any
other utilities you think may fit here which you use, please share
your knowledge.
| Transfering Mail | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Souper | Uqwk | VSoup | Yarn Dialers |
So you have Yarn set up -- but now how do you fetch your mail? How do you actually post mad ravings onto the internet?
Yarn creats, packs and unpacks SOUP packets. You must have another program
to then transfer those packets back and forth between you and your ISP.
SOUP packets can be packed/unpacked on your ISP's server via a Unix shell,
or you can transfer your mail back and forth via a TCP/IP (PPP or SLIP)
connection. So many options!
Souper transfers mail/news
back and forth between your ISP via
TCP/IP
(PPP or SLIP). It is written by the author of Yarn. It supports article
scoring (like Yarn). Souper is a command line driven utility. You will want
to create a CMD file to run it -- but that's all in the Souper
documentation. In addition there are several read-made
dialier and/or transfer scripts available. There
are also several tutorials on various web sites
with step by step instructions (if the documentation isn't enough).
Many Yarn users prefer to dial-up a UNIX shell account and use a UNIX program called Uqwk to gather and pack up their mail/news for transfer. This often reduced transfer time, because the zipped SOUP packet created on the Unix shell is compressed quite a bit. You can then download the packet with Zmodem, or some other transfer protocol.
Although not used a whole lot (Souper or Vsoup being a generally
better option), there is an
OS/2 ported version
of UQwk, which presumably could be used to fetch/post your mail/news via a
TCP/IP (SLIP/PPP) connection as well.
VSoup 1.28 is a multi-threaded version of Souper. It is much, much faster than regular Souper when downloading news. However for fast NNTP usenet news transfers, you can't beat it. Vsoup now supports flexible "score" files -- it does everything Souper does, and more. So there's really no reason to use plain old Souper anymore, except perhaps if you want to maintain absolute compatability between Windows and OS/2 systems -- or just for the nostalgia.
In order to run VSoup you need to have EMX Run-Time Libraries.
If the links above don't work then consult the author's
VSoup documentation page.
Yarn works off-line to read/write mail and usenet news. Souper or Uqwk work to transfer your mail and news back and forth over a TCP/IP connection. All that you might desire is some help to automate the process of connecting to your ISP.
Yarn Dialer 1.53 is very configurable rexx script front end which works with OS/2 TCP/IP to connect to your ISP and download/upload mail and import it with Yarn automatically. It works with the default OS/2 internet dialer, as well as some other third party dialers; using either Souper, or Vsoup. Nicer and more comprehensive than most batch files.
In-Joy 1.1 is
a complete dailer replacement. It can be configured to start programs (or
scripts) when you connect to your ISP, so could be used to automatically
fetch mail. All you have to do is write the batch file to do it. Shareware,
30 day trial.
| Encoding/Decoding Text/Files | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| MIME/Base64 | Pretty Good Privacy | UUencode/UUdecode | Other Encoding Methods |
There comes a time in every netizen's life when just transfering
plain text messages isn't quite enough. Occassionally one might need
to trasnfer a file or graphic via the mail. Sometimes one feels the need
for the extra assurance of privacy that encryption affords. And even if one
never wants to do any of these things, they would doubtless eventually run
across someone who does -- and so need the tools to decode what they find.
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extentions, utilising Base64 encoding) as become an internet standard for message encoding. With it you can theoretically embed graphics, or sounds, or files, into email messages. More often, however, it's simply used as a "file attach" mechanism to encode and transfer a program or data file along with mail.
Yarn has this type of MIME Encoding built in. When you finish writing a message and exit your text editor the Yarn menu has a "File Attach" option. Selecting it will prompt you for a file name. The file you select will then be MIME encoded at the end of your message, and sent out "attached" to it. Yarn, however, does not have any MIME decoding build in. To decode any MIME messages you recieve you will need to have some sort of MIME decoding software, and configure Yarn to recognise and use this software.
MetaMail
is a complex program which allows not only the decoding of MIME encoded
blocks, but also is configurable to automatically run other programs
associated with various Mime-Types. For example, if you
recieve MIME encoded GIF files of the Mime-Type graphic/GIF
then you couldhave MetaMail decode it and automatically call your favorite
graphic viewer/editor to display the thing.
To enable Yarn to use metamail you must edit your %HOME%\yarn\config file and find the line which containing #decode-mime=metamail %f and uncomment it (remove the # character from in front of it).
But that is not all. For metamail to work you also need to set the MAILCAP environmental variable, and create a MAILCAP file to define the Mime-Types and what programs are associated with which type on your system. (If someone out there has a good MAILCAP file, please send it to me to post here as an example). So in your config.sys, for example, you might add:
SET MAILCAP=c:\tcpip\etc\mailcapThen you must create that particular file. There is a sample complex MAILCAP file that comes with MetaMail -- but it is geared towards UNIX, which MetaMail is ported from. The format of the MAILCAP file is a Mime-Type followed by a space and then the command line to run for that type of file. For example:
text/html c:\tcpip\bin\webex.exe image/* c:\pmview\pmview.exeNotice that you can use a wildcard (*) to match a group of file types. The image/* will match image/gif and image/jpg, et cetera.
decode-mime=munpack -C c:\u %fThe above line will simple decode any MIME files to the directory C:\U (make sure you change this to whatever directory/folder on your system you want files decoded to). Then with the file decoded and saved one can access them in whatever way one wants.
What can be said about PGP which has not already been said? PGP is the most secure and widely used method of data encryption. With PGP you can be extremely confident that no one will be able to read a message you send or recieve, except the recipient. To obtain a copy and learn using PGP in general consult the International PGP Home Page.
Yarn has build in support for using PGP. To enable YARN to Encrypt/Decrypt PGP messages you must once again edit your %HOME%\yarn\config file. There are four lines which control PGP actions. They must be uncommented (by removing the # character from in front of them), and possibly edited. The default PGP settings in the Yarn/2 config file are very DOS-oriented. They call DOS batch files (which come with yarn). A quick way to patch that up is to rename the pgp*.bat files in your YARN directory to pgp*.cmd. Then edit the Yarn config file to call the CMD files rather than the BAT files.
However, assuming PGP is in your system's PATH, here are the settings that work best for me:
secret-sign=pgp -ast %f -o %o encrypt=pgp -eastw %f -o %o decrypt=pgp %f -o %o decrypt-view=pgp -m %f
Once you have uncommented the above options, regardless of the exact settings, you will find that when you write an email message and exit from your editor, Yarn's menu will contain an Encrypt option. To decrypt a PGP message when viewing it in yarn press SHIFT-X.
YEP, the Yarn Editor Processor, also has built in support for PGP Encrypting your messages, which supports such things as: only encrypting portions of a message instead of the whole things, encrypting to multiple recipients (including yourself, so you can decrypt your own messages!), hands-off PGP operation.
The most common simple problem associated with getting PGP to work is not having set the PGPPATH environmental variable. See the PGP docs for details. If you have a relatively secure system you may also like to set the PGPPASS environmental variable with your password, so you never need to type it. (WARNING: this is a very unsecure thing to do!)
There are some helper/front end programs for PGP to make it easier
for some people to operate. While these are not needed for use with
yarn, in case you are interested here are some:
UUencoding is the old standard of ASCII encoding of binary files. It is still the most straight forward and convenient way to encode files for trasmission through email, in my opinion. UUencoding stands for Unix-to-Unix Encoding.
Yarn has UUdecoding built in. If you recieve a message that contains a UUencoded file just press SHIFT-B and Yarn will decode it to your news directory or the directory you have set it your yarn CONFIG file:
save-directory = d:\uIf you want to UUencode files, however, you will need a UUencode program. Fortunately there are lots of them, both command line interfaced (CLI) and graphical user interfaced (GUI). Here are just a few, take your pick:
There are other less common encryption/encoding methods out there; many
of them. Here are a few:
| Miscellaneous Yarn Utilites | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Add "Lines:" | Folder (Date) Order | Get (all) NewsGroups | NoNewsIsGoodNews Stats |
| Yarn 2 Soup /w Grep | YIN Inbox/Folder Check | YarnPack (news.dat) | DOS Utils of Note |
There are many "odds and ends" utilities for use with Yarn. Depending
on what you want to do with yarn you may find some of them useful.
Yarn normally only adds a "Lines:" header to outgoing usenet news
articles. If you want to add a "Lines:" header to your email as well
then AddLines
is the tool to do it.
F_Order perminently
re-sorts the messages in any yarn folder based on the "Date:" header.
Otherwise known as NNIGN 2.2,
this program will scan and report all sorts of useless (but perhaps
interesting) statistics about your Yarn 9.x news.dat database.
It can tell you how many articles you currently have, as well as the
amount of "available" space in there. It can even draw irrelavent maps.
A must).
> for trivial minded techies, like me. (OS/2 and DOS versions
included
br>
Unfortunately this wonderful utility has not been updated in some
time and no longer works with the newer Yarn 9.x news.dat
format. However
Yarn to SOUP with Grep
still works fine on Yarn folders. What does is search for messages
and then make all matching messages into a new SOUP file. You can
also use it to convert entire folders into SOUP packets for
re-importing/re-filtering. (OS/2 and DOS versions).
YIN 1.5 is intended primarily for quickly checking
your yarn INBOX).
> folder, without having to start up yarn. But it
can be used on any folder. It will summarise the contents of the folder,
and can even list new (or all) messages to the screen so you can take a
quick peek at them. Speach friendly. (OS/2 and DOS versions included
br>
WARNING: this is an experimental program, and may cause problems with your news.dat -- the latest version, so far, has not had any bug reports however. If you do run into any problems REBUILD -o (or sometimes possibly -r), should fix it. Use at your own risk.
Yarnpack will "pack-in-place" and shrink your Yarn 9.x news.dat file, and not reset your import dates. It also does some integrity checks when you use the /I). > switch (recommended!). (OS/2 and DOS versions p align=left>
| NOTE: If YarnPack gives you an error like "history:####>news.dat:####" do not worry. This is a condition which happens in the Yarn index file quite often. YarnPack does not know how to handle the situation and always errs on the side of caution and reports it as an error and refuses to run to be safe. Unfortunately YarnPack will refuse to run while such a situation exists. Yarn, however, will sort the situation out itself eventually after several normal import/expire actions. All you can do is keep trying to run "yarnpack /i" and monitor the situation until the "error" no longer occurs. |
Yang Lets see...
how to describe it... You know how some news readers only list subscribed
newsgroups which currently have unread articles in them? Yarn always
displays every newsgroup you are currently subscribed to in the at the
newsgroup selection level. With this utility you can automatically 'hide'
newsgroups with no currently unread messages in them, and 'unhide' them
when new messages come in. (OS/2 and DOS versions).
You can get the lastest version from the author's web page (link above), or
a local copy here).
>
(br>
Remember, for other information regarding DOS Yarn utilities visit Kevin Martin's Hands On How To guide and his Bells and Whistles page. And also the Official Yarn Page. With OS/2 you can run any of these DOS utilities, assuming you haven't disabled DOS support or set PROTECTONLY=YES.
Yexport will scan your news.dat file for words or phrases and export found messages to a yarn folder, or an "rnews" file.
Fix Folder salvages messages from a corrupt Yarn folder. It comes with a DOS executable, but the C source code is there as well-- if you are an OS/2 C programmer.
QWKsoup will convert QWK packets to SOUP so you can use Yarn as an offline mail reader for QWK packets as well. It also converts SOUP reply packets to QWK REP packets, ready to upload. Works well, though can be tricky to get working right.
Yarn Utilities are
handy DOS utilities which can do the following: add "Lines:" to Soup
packet, count messages in a folder, make folders editable,
maps messages in a folder, add "X-Revision:" to message, selects messages
from a folder, convert folder to SOUP, sort a folder keeping threads,
delete superseeded messages, convert textfile to a folder,
convert folder to printable text.
Here's some more odds and ends I have yet to work into anyplace else on this page yet...
NewGrp retrieves new USENET group names with Souper/Yarn. Similar to Get News Groups.
Soup 2 Squish
converts SOUP packets into Squish message base format. Good for using
with BBS's that use that format for message bases.
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