Frank Peters posted on Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:27:50 -0400 as excerpted:

> Pan is another wonder of the open source world.  There is literally
> nothing else in its class.  It's good to know that development is alive.
> 
> Pan cannot upload binary files

That's changing! =:^)  HMueller recently added that feature, as well as 
the long awaited score-based actions (auto-delete/mark-read/download-to-
cache/download-and-save) in his git fork (master branch).  The features 
aren't stable enough for khaley's testing branch yet, let alone 
integration, which pkovar would nail into the official gnome git repo and 
ultimately into an official release, but they are there, and uploading at 
least works (I've not tested auto-* actions, yet, myself, having just 
rebuilt with them included).

If you're interested, join pan's user list (on gmane.org as a newsgroup 
if you wish, that's how I do it).  I have a pan-9999 ebuild that can be 
set to all the different repos and branches using environment variables 
set in /etc/portage/env/news-nntp/pan-9999, with a corresponding file 
listing all the repos (mostly on github) and branches I know about, but 
I've only just redesigned it and used it once, myself, so it's not 
public, yet.  But I've already asked and gotten a bit of interest on the 
pan-user list for them, so plan on posting them there shortly.

FWIW, pan can build against gtk3 now, too, tho I won't be personally 
testing that out myself for some time as pretty much everything else gtk 
I use here is gtk2 only (including firefox), so it'll be awhile before I 
even have gtk3 installed, here.

> It's not that I have some extreme irrational bias against graphical
> software, but, in the right hands, console based programs can still
> perform wonderful things in terms of basic output.  Ncurses and s-lang
> are very capable development tools.  But for some reason these things
> are not appreciated by the average user who, if given a choice, will
> usually gravitate to a graphical solution.

I use mc for sys-admin-hat file management and editing, only using the kde 
graphical tools for user-hat stuff (like sorting thru media files, where 
icon-thumbnails are quite useful =:^).  But mail, news, rss, web-
browsing, etc, are more user-hat stuff here, so I tend to prefer 
graphical tools for them.

The thing that has me hooked on ktorrent is all the nice statistical 
graphics it has.  CLI or semi-gui like ncurses can match the raw 
functionality, but hardly the graphical stuff (tho semi-gui could come 
close).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman