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slrn is the creation of John E. Davis (JED) and was first made available in 1994. It was written in part because of JED's dissatisfaction with the relatively sluggish performance of gnus/emacs as well as a general dissatisfaction with other newsreaders such as tin, nn, rn and others. JED also wanted to write software that would utilise his new screen management routines for the S-Lang library and finally wanted to write a newsreader for his girlfriend to use on a VMS platform. From these various threads slrn was created. But what is slrn?

slrn ('S-Lang read news') is a newsreader, i.e. a program that accesses a newsserver to read messages from the Internet News service (also known as 'Usenet'). It runs in console mode on various Unix-like systems (including Linux), 32-bit Windows, OS/2, BeOS and VMS. Beside the usual features of a newsreader slrn supports scoring rules to highlight, sort or kill articles based on information from their header. It is highly customizable, allows free key-bindings and can easily be extended using the sophisticated S-Lang macro language. Offline reading is possible by using either slrnpull (shipped with slrn) or a local newsserver (like leafnode or INN).