GNUS is a program for reading and writing USENET news using GNU Emacs. This manual documents the use and simple customization of GNUS.
Unlike other conventional newsreaders such as rn which was (:-) the most popular newsreader in the world, GNUS runs inside the GNU Emacs editor as a subsystem. This means that there is no need to invoke an editor when composing articles or mail. The reading and writing of articles can be done in the same Emacs environment you usually work in.
Like rrn, a remote version of rn, GNUS can use computer networks for retrieving articles. This means that there is no need to have a local copy of the news spool, to mount a remote file system over the network, or to run Emacs on a remote machine. Its great advantage is to balance loads and exploit resources of the entire computer system in a distributed environment. The protocol used by GNUS is NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol, defined by RFC977.
Unlike rrn, GNUS can talk to many NNTP servers easily. The only thing you have to do is to create startup files for each NNTP server.
Like other libraries of GNU Emacs, GNUS is completely written in Emacs lisp. This means that GNUS is highly extensible and customizable just like GNU Emacs. It is possible to change the behavior of GNUS and extend its functions by using variables and hooks.
GNUS is pronounced "NUZ". Never call it "ghu-NUZ" nor "ghu-NAS".
This manual is currently in progress and thus is incomplete. Your suggestions, bug fixes, and contributions are welcome.