The main window, initially in the upper left corner of the screen, displays a list of newsgroups. Double-clicking on a newsgroup name causes WinVN to display a list of subjects of available articles in that newsgroup in a group article-list window.
Clicking on a newsgroup name "selects" that newsgroup and displays it in reverse video (light on dark). Selecting a newsgroup is useful only for subscribing to it; see Subscribing to Newsgroups. By default, subscribed groups appear in black; unsubscribed groups appear in blue (See Configure Colors).
The first character of each newsgroup line in the main window gives information about that newsgroup:
space indicates either that WinVN has no information on the status of this group, or that no new articles have appeared in this group since your last WinVN session.
> indicates that this newsgroup has been selected as the result of the previous Find operation.
n indicates that new articles have appeared in this newsgroup since your last WinVN session.
u indicates there are unread articles in this newsgroup (though no new articles).
Additionally, an estimate of the number of articles in the group is shown before the group name. If the number of articles in the group is undetermined (i.e. if you did not retrieve the group-list when you connected to your news server), a '-' is displayed instead of the number.