Lucy is a USENET software designed for power users who are already familiar with the platform.
This newsreader is perfect for Perl programmers. It has a skeleton outline for adding text-to-speech capabilities (for visually-impaired users) and a built-in regular expression calculator. Lucy is a fully-featured newsreader that works on command-line. You can customize all of the keys to suit your needs. It also supports subject and newsgroup filtering, making it easier to narrow down your list of newsgroups to those containing "Perl" in their names.
Despite being a Perl newsreader, Lucy is much faster than other newsreaders due to its dynamic loading of Perl modules. It uses its own variant of News::Newsrc for loading your newsrc quickly. Currently, it requires the news server to support the XOVER command, which most servers do, making it much faster than downloading headers.
Lucy also supports external programs, making it easier to use your favorite pager for paging articles and your favorite mail program for emailing. You don't need to configure different pagers for different programs, and Lucy doesn't implement its own mail interface. Lucy makes the pager work seamlessly within the newsreader, and you can configure it to use the program exit code as a keystroke.
Lucy now has better support for Usenet binaries, with background downloading, and several new commands to help with binary readings, such as a binary thread model. To install, simply unpack it wherever you want, run 'perl install.pl,' and it'll check for the modules it needs. It even offers to run CPAN for you. Lucy creates a simple shell script for running it, giving you complete control over your Usenet experience.
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