🚀 go-pugleaf

Just a few of corrections:

First, someone (I misplaced the article) asserted that you can only use NOTES on
VAX processors.  Within the last year or so Digital has made available NOTES
client software for PCs and (I believe) ULTRIX.  The notes conference must still
(I believe) reside on a VAX.  You must be running DECnet on all machines (PCSA,
or whatever it is called these days, on the PCs).

In article <1992Aug5.212010.6060@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>, lake@cwjcc.INS.CWRU.Edu (Dr. Robin Lake) writes:

|> IMHO, VAXNotes is seriously brain-damaged.  One can NOT follow a "thread"
|> through a VAXNotes Conference (no CTRL-n equivalent)....

Notes conferences are structured by topics and replies.  If users always use the
WRITE command (and don't REPLY to a given basenote), you'll end up with a
mess.  However, if all replies to a basenote (nnn.0) are created with REPLY, 
the conference is automatically organized by 'threads' (replies become nnn.1,
nnn.2, etc).

|> ...  There is no way to search
|> by title ---  one must suffer the delay of searching the entire texts in
|> a Topic or Conference....

Use DIR/TITLE=substr, which will search each title for the substring you specify.
Sure, it isn't a regular expression, but it is better than a search of the
whole text.  (Also, you can to a DIR/OUTPUT=file and then SEARCH the file from
DCL, if you want to be more fancy.)

Be sure to press the HELP key (or PF2 if you have a VT100-like keyboard) and
you'll see lots of good stuff on the keypad.  KP, for "NEXT UNSEEN", and KP1 and
KP3 (if I remember correctly) for next/previous reply, and so on.

Sure, I'll confess:  I used to work at Digital, and I'm an engineer, and I even
saw a manual.  I won't say that NOTES is the best thing since sliced bread, but
it is reasonably usable, and most people just don't know what the product can
do.  The fact that so many people don't use NOTES better is probably Digital's
'fault', IMHO.

Lloyd Wheeler
wheeler@kpc.com