Hume Smith writes:
 > > use (whatever, I use tin but it's not optimal) for news,
 > 
 > my very favourite by parsecs is gnus/emacs.  avoid nn at all costs.

Gnus 5.0 is very nice.  Article scoring, threads, kill files, etc.

 > > emacs for editing
 > 
 > editing?  i thought it was the OS :)  i also use w3/emacs for web browsing.
 > the biggest problem with that is not being able to edit while waiting for
 > a page to load.  the lack of embedded images under gnu emacs doesn't bother
 > me, but if you really want them, get lucid emacs.

Actually, it's called XEmacs, these days.  It's very nice, but I
wouldn't recommend using w3 for a web browser unless you have a very
fast machine.  It's an order of magnitude slower than Mosaic for my 25
Mhz 68030 (A3000).

 > > PERL for scripts that require arrays
 > 
 > nope.  tclsh for scripts that need arrays.  i'm adamant on that one.

I haven't used tclsh, but Perl would be my choice.  It's still beta,
but you can write X applications in Perl using TkPerl.