PicoSpan Advanced Features

Keeping a List of Your Conferences

You can keep a list of conferences which you want to read in a file called .cflist in your home directory. Use an editor to create .cflist which contains a list of conferences, one per line. Your .cflist might read:

	agora
	info
	coop
	cooking
	classified
	synthesis

Once you have this file, you will automatically enter the first conference in your list whenever you start Picospan, unless you say otherwise. From the Ok: prompt, you can use the command "check" to see how many new items and new-reponse items are in each of those conferences. The "next" command will take you to the next conference with any new material in it.

Commands to Customize Picospan

There are several things you can set up for you Picospan sessions automatically. You need to use an editor to create a file in your home directory called .cfonce

Every time you start a Picospan session, Picospan will execute the commands in your .cfonce file. Here are a few commands you can use there:

define pager - This lets you select the program which feeds the output to your terminal. You can use any of our pager programs, the two most popular ones are more and less. In your file, you can use one of:
```
	define pager more
	define pager less
	define pager "less -dE -P 'Press Spacebar for more, q to quit'"
```
define editor - This lets you select the editor you will use any time you enter an item or response in Picospan. You don't need to worry about filenames, just give the command name for the editor of your choice. Here are a few examples:
```
	define editor vi
	define editor bbsed
	define editor "pico -nn"
```
define shell - This tells Picospan which shell you want to use whenever you run a Unix command. Also, if you enter a ! by itself, it will give you this Unix shell. Some examples:
```
	define shell csh
	define shell bash
```
set edalways - If you have an editor defined, this tells Picospan to always use that editor, rather than the built-in editor. Just put that in your .cfonce, like so:
```
	set edalways
```
set nosource - The fairwitness of a conference may have defined certain commands to be run every time you enter the conference, such as changing the "Ok:" prompt to something else. If you'd rather not have this happen, put thise in your .cfonce :
```
	set nosource
```