Newbie wannabe seeking emacs facts

[Marshall Price]

  I have a Windows XP laptop and installed Cygwin hoping to run tin to 
give me a text-based, window-free, full-screen newsreader.

  I failed.

  But out of curiosity, I installed emacs, but discovered it to be much 
to complicated even to begin to understand.

  Would anybody care to raise or lower my hopes of getting what I'd 
like, an 80-character-wide, 24-line high, window-free text-based 
newsreader, hopefully with two lines of reminders at the bottom showing 
what individual keystrokes do?

  And will I have to use emacs, and if so, can I get just the facts I 
need to get gnus running and nothing else?

--
Marshall Price of Miami
marshallprice@att.net
http://marshallprice.wordpress.com