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Gnus Manual

2.3 Selecting a Group

SPC

Select the current group, switch to the summary buffer and display the first unread article (gnus-group-read-group). If there are no unread articles in the group, or if you give a non-numerical prefix to this command, Gnus will offer to fetch all the old articles in this group from the server. If you give a numerical prefix N, N determines the number of articles Gnus will fetch. If N is positive, Gnus fetches the N newest articles, if N is negative, Gnus fetches the abs(N) oldest articles.

Thus, SPC enters the group normally, C-u SPC offers old articles, C-u 4 2 SPC fetches the 42 newest articles, and C-u - 4 2 SPC fetches the 42 oldest ones.

When you are in the group (in the Summary buffer), you can type M-g to fetch new articles, or C-u M-g to also show the old ones.

RET

Select the current group and switch to the summary buffer (gnus-group-select-group). Takes the same arguments as gnus-group-read-group---the only difference is that this command does not display the first unread article automatically upon group entry.

M-RET

This does the same as the command above, but tries to do it with the minimum amount of fuzz (gnus-group-quick-select-group). No scoring/killing will be performed, there will be no highlights and no expunging. This might be useful if you're in a real hurry and have to enter some humongous group. If you give a 0 prefix to this command (i.e., 0 M-RET), Gnus won't even generate the summary buffer, which is useful if you want to toggle threading before generating the summary buffer (see section 3.25.3 Summary Generation Commands).

M-SPC

This is yet one more command that does the same as the RET command, but this one does it without expunging and hiding dormants (gnus-group-visible-select-group).

M-C-RET

Finally, this command selects the current group ephemerally without doing any processing of its contents (gnus-group-select-group-ephemerally). Even threading has been turned off. Everything you do in the group after selecting it in this manner will have no permanent effects.

The gnus-large-newsgroup variable says what Gnus should consider to be a big group. This is 200 by default. If the group has more (unread and/or ticked) articles than this, Gnus will query the user before entering the group. The user can then specify how many articles should be fetched from the server. If the user specifies a negative number (-n), the n oldest articles will be fetched. If it is positive, the n articles that have arrived most recently will be fetched.

gnus-auto-select-first control whether any articles are selected automatically when entering a group with the SPC command.

nil

Don't select any articles when entering the group. Just display the full summary buffer.

t

Select the first unread article when entering the group.

best

Select the highest scored article in the group when entering the group.

This variable can also be a function. In that case, that function will be called to place point on a subject line, and/or select some article. Useful functions include:

gnus-summary-first-unread-subject

Place point on the subject line of the first unread article, but don't select the article.

gnus-summary-first-unread-article

Select the first unread article.

gnus-summary-best-unread-article

Select the highest-scored unread article.

If you want to prevent automatic selection in some group (say, in a binary group with Huge articles) you can set this variable to nil in gnus-select-group-hook, which is called when a group is selected.