Sorting Entries within the Groups tab

[itimpi]

The only facility that is provided within the Newsbin user interface for sorting the entries within the Groups tab of Newsbin is to click on the "Groups" column to sort alphabetically (or twice for reverse alphabetical order).

Many people would like to manually arrange their group list in some other way. One day Newsbin 5 may support drag-and-drop type functionality to do this through the user interface, but so far this is not available. The following describes how you can do this by editing the Newsbin configuration file directly.

Before you start make sure that

• Newsbin is not already running.
• You have made a backup copy of your Newsbin Configuration file . If you mess up this manual edit Newsbin might fail to load your configuration file so make sure you can get back to the previuosly working position

You can then open the Configuration file in your favorite text editor. Notepad will do, but any text editing alternative will work as well.

Setting the Groups of Groups order

The Groups of Groups (typically abreviated to GoG) is the name given to the sub groupings within the Groups list. They are identified by having a symbol rather like the Folder symbol used within Windows Explorer, and are typically used to arrange your groups into categories that you want to treat in a similar manner.

To set the order for these search the configuration file and look for a line containing

Code: Select all

[Topics]

The entries in this section of the configuration file lists the GoG entries in the order in which they appear in the Newsbin user interface. It should always contain an entry called Unsorted plus the names of any Gog's you have created of your own. You can re-arrange these to any order you like.

Setting the groups order within the GoG's

Once you have got the GoG entries in the order that you want the next step is to arrange the group names within a GoG to the order that you desire. If you look through the configuration file you will see that there are many sections whose name are of the form

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[Groupname]

where Groupname corresponds to name of one of the groups to which you have subscribed.

Within each of these sections for each group you will see a line of the form

Code: Select all

Parent=GogName

where GogName is the name of the GoG within which this group is shown by Newsbin.

The order of these group sections determines the order in which the groups are shown within Newsbin. Therefore by moving such sections around within the configuration file you can change the order in which the groups appear within Newsbin. If you are moving such a group entry make sure you move each group entry in its entirety and take all the lines in the section.