Gnus Manual. Node: Selecting a Group

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2.3: Selecting a Group

SPACE

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.

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 Summary Generation Commands).

M-SPACE

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 SPACE 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.

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.

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