3. Summary Buffer

A line for each article is displayed in the summary buffer. You can move around, read articles, post articles and reply to articles.

The most common way to a summary buffer is to select a group from the group buffer (see section Selecting a Group).

You can have as many summary buffers open as you wish.

The key v is reserved for users. You can bind it key to some function or better use it as a prefix key. For example:

(define-key gnus-summary-mode-map (kbd "v -") "LrS") ;; lower subthread

3.1 Summary Buffer Format

Gnus will use the value of the gnus-extract-address-components variable as a function for getting the name and address parts of a From header. Two pre-defined functions exist: gnus-extract-address-components, which is the default, quite fast, and too simplistic solution; and mail-extract-address-components, which works very nicely, but is slower. The default function will return the wrong answer in 5% of the cases. If this is unacceptable to you, use the other function instead:

(setq gnus-extract-address-components
      'mail-extract-address-components)

gnus-summary-same-subject is a string indicating that the current article has the same subject as the previous. This string will be used with those specs that require it. The default is "".

3.1.1 Summary Buffer Lines

You can change the format of the lines in the summary buffer by changing the gnus-summary-line-format variable. It works along the same lines as a normal format string, with some extensions (see section Formatting Variables).

There should always be a colon or a point position marker on the line; the cursor always moves to the point position marker or the colon after performing an operation. (Of course, Gnus wouldn’t be Gnus if it wasn’t possible to change this. Just write a new function gnus-goto-colon which does whatever you like with the cursor.) See section Positioning Point.

The default string is ‘%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-23,23f%]%) %s\n’.

The following format specification characters and extended format specification(s) are understood:

‘N’

Article number.

‘S’

Subject string. List identifiers stripped, gnus-list-identifies. See section Article Hiding.

‘s’

Subject if the article is the root of the thread or the previous article had a different subject, gnus-summary-same-subject otherwise. (gnus-summary-same-subject defaults to "".)

‘F’

Full From header.

‘n’

The name (from the From header).

‘f’

The name, To header or the Newsgroups header (see section To From Newsgroups).

‘a’

The name (from the From header). This differs from the n spec in that it uses the function designated by the gnus-extract-address-components variable, which is slower, but may be more thorough.

‘A’

The address (from the From header). This works the same way as the a spec.

‘L’

Number of lines in the article.

‘c’

Number of characters in the article. This specifier is not supported in some methods (like nnfolder).

‘k’

Pretty-printed version of the number of characters in the article; for example, ‘1.2k’ or ‘0.4M’.

‘I’

Indentation based on thread level (see section Customizing Threading).

‘B’

A complex trn-style thread tree, showing response-connecting trace lines. A thread could be drawn like this:

> +-> | +-> | | \-> | | \-> | \-> +-> \->

You can customize the appearance with the following options. Note that it is possible to make the thread display look really neat by replacing the default ASCII characters with graphic line-drawing glyphs.

gnus-sum-thread-tree-root

Used for the root of a thread. If nil, use subject instead. The default is ‘> ’.

gnus-sum-thread-tree-false-root

Used for the false root of a thread (see section Loose Threads). If nil, use subject instead. The default is ‘> ’.

gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-indent

Used for a thread with just one message. If nil, use subject instead. The default is ‘’.

gnus-sum-thread-tree-vertical

Used for drawing a vertical line. The default is ‘| ’.

gnus-sum-thread-tree-indent

Used for indenting. The default is ‘ ’.

gnus-sum-thread-tree-leaf-with-other

Used for a leaf with brothers. The default is ‘+-> ’.

gnus-sum-thread-tree-single-leaf

Used for a leaf without brothers. The default is ‘\-> ’

‘T’

Nothing if the article is a root and lots of spaces if it isn’t (it pushes everything after it off the screen).

‘[’

Opening bracket, which is normally ‘[’, but can also be ‘<’ for adopted articles (see section Customizing Threading).

‘]’

Closing bracket, which is normally ‘]’, but can also be ‘>’ for adopted articles.

‘>’

One space for each thread level.

‘<’

Twenty minus thread level spaces.

‘U’

Unread. See section Read Articles.

‘R’

This misleadingly named specifier is the secondary mark. This mark will say whether the article has been replied to, has been cached, or has been saved. See section Other Marks.

‘i’

Score as a number (see section Scoring).

‘z’

Zcore, ‘+’ if above the default level and ‘-’ if below the default level. If the difference between gnus-summary-default-score and the score is less than gnus-summary-zcore-fuzz, this spec will not be used.

‘V’

Total thread score.

‘x’

Xref.

‘D’

Date.

‘d’

The Date in DD-MMM format.

‘o’

The Date in YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS format.

‘M’

Message-ID.

‘r’

References.

‘t’

Number of articles in the current sub-thread. Using this spec will slow down summary buffer generation somewhat.

‘e’

An ‘=’ (gnus-not-empty-thread-mark) will be displayed if the article has any children.

‘P’

The line number.

‘O’

Download mark.

‘*’

Desired cursor position (instead of after first colon).

‘&user-date;’

Age sensitive date format. Various date format is defined in gnus-user-date-format-alist.

‘u’

User defined specifier. The next character in the format string should be a letter. Gnus will call the function gnus-user-format-function-x, where x is the letter following ‘%u’. The function will be passed the current header as argument. The function should return a string, which will be inserted into the summary just like information from any other summary specifier.

Text between ‘%(’ and ‘%)’ will be highlighted with gnus-mouse-face when the mouse point is placed inside the area. There can only be one such area.

The ‘%U’ (status), ‘%R’ (replied) and ‘%z’ (zcore) specs have to be handled with care. For reasons of efficiency, Gnus will compute what column these characters will end up in, and “hard-code” that. This means that it is invalid to have these specs after a variable-length spec. Well, you might not be arrested, but your summary buffer will look strange, which is bad enough.

The smart choice is to have these specs as far to the left as possible. (Isn’t that the case with everything, though? But I digress.)

This restriction may disappear in later versions of Gnus.

3.1.2 To From Newsgroups

In some groups (particularly in archive groups), the From header isn’t very interesting, since all the articles there are written by you. To display the information in the To or Newsgroups headers instead, you need to decide three things: What information to gather; where to display it; and when to display it.

1. The reading of extra header information is controlled by the gnus-extra-headers. This is a list of header symbols. For instance:

   (setq gnus-extra-headers '(To Newsgroups X-Newsreader))

   This will result in Gnus trying to obtain these three headers, and storing it in header structures for later easy retrieval.

2. The value of these extra headers can be accessed via the gnus-extra-header function. Here’s a format line spec that will access the X-Newsreader header:

   "%~(form (gnus-extra-header 'X-Newsreader))@"

3. The gnus-ignored-from-addresses variable says when the ‘%f’ summary line spec returns the To, Newsreader or From header. If this regexp matches the contents of the From header, the value of the To or Newsreader headers are used instead.

A related variable is nnmail-extra-headers, which controls when to include extra headers when generating overview (NOV) files. If you have old overview files, you should regenerate them after changing this variable, by entering the server buffer using ^, and then g on the appropriate mail server (e.g. nnml) to cause regeneration.

You also have to instruct Gnus to display the data by changing the %n spec to the %f spec in the gnus-summary-line-format variable.

In summary, you’d typically put something like the following in ‘~/.gnus.el’:

(setq gnus-extra-headers
      '(To Newsgroups))
(setq nnmail-extra-headers gnus-extra-headers)
(setq gnus-summary-line-format
      "%U%R%z%I%(%[%4L: %-23,23f%]%) %s\n")
(setq gnus-ignored-from-addresses
      "Your Name Here")

(The values listed above are the default values in Gnus. Alter them to fit your needs.)

A note for news server administrators, or for users who wish to try to convince their news server administrator to provide some additional support:

The above is mostly useful for mail groups, where you have control over the NOV files that are created. However, if you can persuade your nntp admin to add (in the usual implementation, notably INN):

Newsgroups:full

to the end of her ‘overview.fmt’ file, then you can use that just as you would the extra headers from the mail groups.

3.1.3 Summary Buffer Mode Line

You can also change the format of the summary mode bar (see section Mode Line Formatting). Set gnus-summary-mode-line-format to whatever you like. The default is ‘Gnus: %%b [%A] %Z’.

Here are the elements you can play with:

‘G’

Group name.

‘p’

Unprefixed group name.

‘A’

Current article number.

‘z’

Current article score.

‘V’

Gnus version.

‘U’

Number of unread articles in this group.

‘e’

Number of unread articles in this group that aren’t displayed in the summary buffer.

‘Z’

A string with the number of unread and unselected articles represented either as ‘<%U(+%e) more>’ if there are both unread and unselected articles, and just as ‘<%U more>’ if there are just unread articles and no unselected ones.

‘g’

Shortish group name. For instance, ‘rec.arts.anime’ will be shortened to ‘r.a.anime’.

‘S’

Subject of the current article.

‘u’

User-defined spec (see section User-Defined Specs).

‘s’

Name of the current score file (see section Scoring).

‘d’

Number of dormant articles (see section Unread Articles).

‘t’

Number of ticked articles (see section Unread Articles).

‘r’

Number of articles that have been marked as read in this session.

‘E’

Number of articles expunged by the score files.

3.1.4 Summary Highlighting

gnus-visual-mark-article-hook

This hook is run after selecting an article. It is meant to be used for highlighting the article in some way. It is not run if gnus-visual is nil.

gnus-summary-update-hook

This hook is called when a summary line is changed. It is not run if gnus-visual is nil.

gnus-summary-selected-face

This is the face (or font as some people call it) used to highlight the current article in the summary buffer.

gnus-summary-highlight

Summary lines are highlighted according to this variable, which is a list where the elements are of the format (form . face). If you would, for instance, like ticked articles to be italic and high-scored articles to be bold, you could set this variable to something like

(((eq mark gnus-ticked-mark) . italic) ((> score default) . bold))

As you may have guessed, if form returns a non-nil value, face will be applied to the line.

3.2 Summary Maneuvering

All the straight movement commands understand the numeric prefix and behave pretty much as you’d expect.

None of these commands select articles.

G M-n

M-n

Go to the next summary line of an unread article (gnus-summary-next-unread-subject).

G M-p

M-p

Go to the previous summary line of an unread article (gnus-summary-prev-unread-subject).

G g

Ask for an article number and then go to the summary line of that article without displaying the article (gnus-summary-goto-subject).

If Gnus asks you to press a key to confirm going to the next group, you can use the C-n and C-p keys to move around the group buffer, searching for the next group to read without actually returning to the group buffer.

Variables related to summary movement:

gnus-auto-select-next

If you issue one of the movement commands (like n) and there are no more unread articles after the current one, Gnus will offer to go to the next group. If this variable is t and the next group is empty, Gnus will exit summary mode and return to the group buffer. If this variable is neither t nor nil, Gnus will select the next group with unread articles. As a special case, if this variable is quietly, Gnus will select the next group without asking for confirmation. If this variable is almost-quietly, the same will happen only if you are located on the last article in the group. Finally, if this variable is slightly-quietly, the Z n command will go to the next group without confirmation. Also see section Group Levels.

gnus-auto-select-same

If non-nil, all the movement commands will try to go to the next article with the same subject as the current. (Same here might mean roughly equal. See gnus-summary-gather-subject-limit for details (see section Customizing Threading).) If there are no more articles with the same subject, go to the first unread article.

This variable is not particularly useful if you use a threaded display.

gnus-summary-check-current

If non-nil, all the “unread” movement commands will not proceed to the next (or previous) article if the current article is unread. Instead, they will choose the current article.

gnus-auto-center-summary

If non-nil, Gnus will keep the point in the summary buffer centered at all times. This makes things quite tidy, but if you have a slow network connection, or simply do not like this un-Emacsism, you can set this variable to nil to get the normal Emacs scrolling action. This will also inhibit horizontal re-centering of the summary buffer, which might make it more inconvenient to read extremely long threads.

This variable can also be a number. In that case, center the window at the given number of lines from the top.

3.3 Choosing Articles

3.3.1 Choosing Commands

None of the following movement commands understand the numeric prefix, and they all select and display an article.

If you want to fetch new articles or redisplay the group, see Exiting the Summary Buffer.

SPACE

Select the current article, or, if that one’s read already, the next unread article (gnus-summary-next-page).

If you have an article window open already and you press SPACE again, the article will be scrolled. This lets you conveniently SPACE through an entire newsgroup. See section Scrolling the Article.

G n

n

Go to next unread article (gnus-summary-next-unread-article).

G p

p

Go to previous unread article (gnus-summary-prev-unread-article).

G N

N

Go to the next article (gnus-summary-next-article).

G P

P

Go to the previous article (gnus-summary-prev-article).

G C-n

Go to the next article with the same subject (gnus-summary-next-same-subject).

G C-p

Go to the previous article with the same subject (gnus-summary-prev-same-subject).

G f

.

Go to the first unread article (gnus-summary-first-unread-article).

G b

,

Go to the unread article with the highest score (gnus-summary-best-unread-article). If given a prefix argument, go to the first unread article that has a score over the default score.

G l

l

Go to the previous article read (gnus-summary-goto-last-article).

G o

Pop an article off the summary history and go to this article (gnus-summary-pop-article). This command differs from the command above in that you can pop as many previous articles off the history as you like, while l toggles the two last read articles. For a somewhat related issue (if you use these commands a lot), see section Article Backlog.

G j

j

Ask for an article number or Message-ID, and then go to that article (gnus-summary-goto-article).

3.3.2 Choosing Variables

Some variables relevant for moving and selecting articles:

gnus-auto-extend-newsgroup

All the movement commands will try to go to the previous (or next) article, even if that article isn’t displayed in the Summary buffer if this variable is non-nil. Gnus will then fetch the article from the server and display it in the article buffer.

gnus-select-article-hook

This hook is called whenever an article is selected. The default is nil. If you would like each article to be saved in the Agent as you read it, putting gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article on this hook will do so.

gnus-mark-article-hook

This hook is called whenever an article is selected. It is intended to be used for marking articles as read. The default value is gnus-summary-mark-read-and-unread-as-read, and will change the mark of almost any article you read to gnus-read-mark. The only articles not affected by this function are ticked, dormant, and expirable articles. If you’d instead like to just have unread articles marked as read, you can use gnus-summary-mark-unread-as-read instead. It will leave marks like gnus-low-score-mark, gnus-del-mark (and so on) alone.

3.4 Scrolling the Article

SPACE

Pressing SPACE will scroll the current article forward one page, or, if you have come to the end of the current article, will choose the next article (gnus-summary-next-page).

If gnus-article-skip-boring is non-nil and the rest of the article consists only of citations and signature, then it will be skipped; the next article will be shown instead. You can customize what is considered uninteresting with gnus-article-boring-faces. You can manually view the article’s pages, no matter how boring, using C-M-v.

DEL

Scroll the current article back one page (gnus-summary-prev-page).

RET

Scroll the current article one line forward (gnus-summary-scroll-up).

M-RET

Scroll the current article one line backward (gnus-summary-scroll-down).

A g

g

(Re)fetch the current article (gnus-summary-show-article). If given a prefix, fetch the current article, but don’t run any of the article treatment functions. This will give you a “raw” article, just the way it came from the server.

If given a numerical prefix, you can do semi-manual charset stuff. C-u 0 g cn-gb-2312 RET will decode the message as if it were encoded in the cn-gb-2312 charset. If you have

(setq gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist '((1 . cn-gb-2312) (2 . big5)))

then you can say C-u 1 g to get the same effect.

A <

<

Scroll to the beginning of the article (gnus-summary-beginning-of-article).

A >

>

Scroll to the end of the article (gnus-summary-end-of-article).

A s

s

Perform an isearch in the article buffer (gnus-summary-isearch-article).

h

Select the article buffer (gnus-summary-select-article-buffer).

3.5 Reply, Followup and Post

3.5.1 Summary Mail Commands

Commands for composing a mail message:

S r

r

Mail a reply to the author of the current article (gnus-summary-reply).

S R

R

Mail a reply to the author of the current article and include the original message (gnus-summary-reply-with-original). This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S w

Mail a wide reply to the author of the current article (gnus-summary-wide-reply). A wide reply is a reply that goes out to all people listed in the To, From (or Reply-to) and Cc headers. If Mail-Followup-To is present, that’s used instead.

S W

Mail a wide reply to the current article and include the original message (gnus-summary-wide-reply-with-original). This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S v

Mail a very wide reply to the author of the current article (gnus-summary-wide-reply). A very wide reply is a reply that goes out to all people listed in the To, From (or Reply-to) and Cc headers in all the process/prefixed articles. This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S V

Mail a very wide reply to the author of the current article and include the original message (gnus-summary-very-wide-reply-with-original). This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S B r

Mail a reply to the author of the current article but ignore the Reply-To field (gnus-summary-reply-broken-reply-to). If you need this because a mailing list incorrectly sets a Reply-To header pointing to the list, you probably want to set the broken-reply-to group parameter instead, so things will work correctly. See section Group Parameters.

S B R

Mail a reply to the author of the current article and include the original message but ignore the Reply-To field (gnus-summary-reply-broken-reply-to-with-original).

S o m

C-c C-f

Forward the current article to some other person (gnus-summary-mail-forward). If no prefix is given, the message is forwarded according to the value of (message-forward-as-mime) and (message-forward-show-mml); if the prefix is 1, decode the message and forward directly inline; if the prefix is 2, forward message as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 3, decode message and forward as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 4, forward message directly inline; otherwise, the message is forwarded as no prefix given but use the flipped value of (message-forward-as-mime). By default, the message is decoded and forwarded as an rfc822 MIME section.

S m

m

Prepare a mail (gnus-summary-mail-other-window). By default, use the posting style of the current group. If given a prefix, disable that. If the prefix is 1, prompt for a group name to find the posting style.

S i

i

Prepare a news (gnus-summary-news-other-window). By default, post to the current group. If given a prefix, disable that. If the prefix is 1, prompt for a group to post to.

This function actually prepares a news even when using mail groups. This is useful for “posting” messages to mail groups without actually sending them over the network: they’re just saved directly to the group in question. The corresponding back end must have a request-post method for this to work though.

S D b

If you have sent a mail, but the mail was bounced back to you for some reason (wrong address, transient failure), you can use this command to resend that bounced mail (gnus-summary-resend-bounced-mail). You will be popped into a mail buffer where you can edit the headers before sending the mail off again. If you give a prefix to this command, and the bounced mail is a reply to some other mail, Gnus will try to fetch that mail and display it for easy perusal of its headers. This might very well fail, though.

S D r

Not to be confused with the previous command, gnus-summary-resend-message will prompt you for an address to send the current message off to, and then send it to that place. The headers of the message won’t be altered—but lots of headers that say Resent-To, Resent-From and so on will be added. This means that you actually send a mail to someone that has a To header that (probably) points to yourself. This will confuse people. So, natcherly you’ll only do that if you’re really eVIl.

This command is mainly used if you have several accounts and want to ship a mail to a different account of yours. (If you’re both root and postmaster and get a mail for postmaster to the root account, you may want to resend it to postmaster. Ordnung muss sein!

This command understands the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).

S D e

Like the previous command, but will allow you to edit the message as if it were a new message before resending.

S O m

Digest the current series (see section Decoding Articles) and forward the result using mail (gnus-uu-digest-mail-forward). This command uses the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).

S M-c

Send a complaint about excessive crossposting to the author of the current article (gnus-summary-mail-crosspost-complaint).

This command is provided as a way to fight back against the current crossposting pandemic that’s sweeping Usenet. It will compose a reply using the gnus-crosspost-complaint variable as a preamble. This command understands the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix) and will prompt you before sending each mail.

Also See (message)Header Commands section ‘Header Commands’ in The Message Manual, for more information.

3.5.2 Summary Post Commands

Commands for posting a news article:

S p

a

Prepare for posting an article (gnus-summary-post-news). By default, post to the current group. If given a prefix, disable that. If the prefix is 1, prompt for another group instead.

S f

f

Post a followup to the current article (gnus-summary-followup).

S F

F

Post a followup to the current article and include the original message (gnus-summary-followup-with-original). This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S n

Post a followup to the current article via news, even if you got the message through mail (gnus-summary-followup-to-mail).

S N

Post a followup to the current article via news, even if you got the message through mail and include the original message (gnus-summary-followup-to-mail-with-original). This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S o p

Forward the current article to a newsgroup (gnus-summary-post-forward). If no prefix is given, the message is forwarded according to the value of (message-forward-as-mime) and (message-forward-show-mml); if the prefix is 1, decode the message and forward directly inline; if the prefix is 2, forward message as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 3, decode message and forward as an rfc822 MIME section; if the prefix is 4, forward message directly inline; otherwise, the message is forwarded as no prefix given but use the flipped value of (message-forward-as-mime). By default, the message is decoded and forwarded as an rfc822 MIME section.

S O p

Digest the current series and forward the result to a newsgroup (gnus-uu-digest-post-forward). This command uses the process/prefix convention.

S u

Uuencode a file, split it into parts, and post it as a series (gnus-uu-post-news). (see section Uuencoding and Posting).

Also See (message)Header Commands section ‘Header Commands’ in The Message Manual, for more information.

3.5.3 Summary Message Commands

S y

Yank the current article into an already existing Message composition buffer (gnus-summary-yank-message). This command prompts for what message buffer you want to yank into, and understands the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).

3.5.4 Canceling Articles

Have you ever written something, and then decided that you really, really, really wish you hadn’t posted that?

Well, you can’t cancel mail, but you can cancel posts.

Find the article you wish to cancel (you can only cancel your own articles, so don’t try any funny stuff). Then press C or S c (gnus-summary-cancel-article). Your article will be canceled—machines all over the world will be deleting your article. This command uses the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).

Be aware, however, that not all sites honor cancels, so your article may live on here and there, while most sites will delete the article in question.

Gnus will use the “current” select method when canceling. If you want to use the standard posting method, use the ‘a’ symbolic prefix (see section Symbolic Prefixes).

Gnus ensures that only you can cancel your own messages using a Cancel-Lock header (see Canceling News: (message)Canceling News section ‘Canceling News’ in Message Manual).

If you discover that you have made some mistakes and want to do some corrections, you can post a superseding article that will replace your original article.

Go to the original article and press S s (gnus-summary-supersede-article). You will be put in a buffer where you can edit the article all you want before sending it off the usual way.

The same goes for superseding as for canceling, only more so: Some sites do not honor superseding. On those sites, it will appear that you have posted almost the same article twice.

If you have just posted the article, and change your mind right away, there is a trick you can use to cancel/supersede the article without waiting for the article to appear on your site first. You simply return to the post buffer (which is called *sent ...*). There you will find the article you just posted, with all the headers intact. Change the Message-ID header to a Cancel or Supersedes header by substituting one of those words for the word Message-ID. Then just press C-c C-c to send the article as you would do normally. The previous article will be canceled/superseded.

Just remember, kids: There is no ’c’ in ’supersede’.

3.6 Delayed Articles

Sometimes, you might wish to delay the sending of a message. For example, you might wish to arrange for a message to turn up just in time to remind your about the birthday of your Significant Other. For this, there is the gnus-delay package. Setup is simple:

(gnus-delay-initialize)

Normally, to send a message you use the C-c C-c command from Message mode. To delay a message, use C-c C-j (gnus-delay-article) instead. This will ask you for how long the message should be delayed. Possible answers are:

• A time span. Consists of an integer and a letter. For example, 42d means to delay for 42 days. Available letters are m (minutes), h (hours), d (days), w (weeks), M (months) and Y (years).
• A specific date. Looks like YYYY-MM-DD. The message will be delayed until that day, at a specific time (eight o’clock by default). See also gnus-delay-default-hour.
• A specific time of day. Given in hh:mm format, 24h, no am/pm stuff. The deadline will be at that time today, except if that time has already passed, then it’s at the given time tomorrow. So if it’s ten o’clock in the morning and you specify 11:15, then the deadline is one hour and fifteen minutes hence. But if you specify 9:20, that means a time tomorrow.

The action of the gnus-delay-article command is influenced by a couple of variables:

gnus-delay-default-hour

When you specify a specific date, the message will be due on that hour on the given date. Possible values are integers 0 through 23.

gnus-delay-default-delay

This is a string and gives the default delay. It can be of any of the formats described above.

gnus-delay-group

Delayed articles will be kept in this group on the drafts server until they are due. You probably don’t need to change this. The default value is "delayed".

gnus-delay-header

The deadline for each article will be stored in a header. This variable is a string and gives the header name. You probably don’t need to change this. The default value is "X-Gnus-Delayed".

The way delaying works is like this: when you use the gnus-delay-article command, you give a certain delay. Gnus calculates the deadline of the message and stores it in the X-Gnus-Delayed header and puts the message in the nndraft:delayed group.

And whenever you get new news, Gnus looks through the group for articles which are due and sends them. It uses the gnus-delay-send-queue function for this. By default, this function is added to the hook gnus-get-new-news-hook. But of course, you can change this. Maybe you want to use the demon to send drafts? Just tell the demon to execute the gnus-delay-send-queue function.

gnus-delay-initialize

By default, this function installs gnus-delay-send-queue in gnus-get-new-news-hook. But it accepts the optional second argument no-check. If it is non-nil, gnus-get-new-news-hook is not changed. The optional first argument is ignored.

For example, (gnus-delay-initialize nil t) means to do nothing. Presumably, you want to use the demon for sending due delayed articles. Just don’t forget to set that up :-)

3.7 Marking Articles

There are several marks you can set on an article.

You have marks that decide the readedness (whoo, neato-keano neologism ohoy!) of the article. Alphabetic marks generally mean read, while non-alphabetic characters generally mean unread.

In addition, you also have marks that do not affect readedness.

3.7.1 Unread Articles

The following marks mark articles as (kinda) unread, in one form or other.

‘!’

Marked as ticked (gnus-ticked-mark).

Ticked articles are articles that will remain visible always. If you see an article that you find interesting, or you want to put off reading it, or replying to it, until sometime later, you’d typically tick it. However, articles can be expired (from news servers by the news server software, Gnus itself never expires ticked messages), so if you want to keep an article forever, you’ll have to make it persistent (see section Persistent Articles).

‘?’

Marked as dormant (gnus-dormant-mark).

Dormant articles will only appear in the summary buffer if there are followups to it. If you want to see them even if they don’t have followups, you can use the / D command (see section Limiting). Otherwise (except for the visibility issue), they are just like ticked messages.

‘SPACE’

Marked as unread (gnus-unread-mark).

Unread articles are articles that haven’t been read at all yet.

3.7.2 Read Articles

All the following marks mark articles as read.

‘r’

These are articles that the user has marked as read with the d command manually, more or less (gnus-del-mark).

‘R’

Articles that have actually been read (gnus-read-mark).

‘O’

Articles that were marked as read in previous sessions and are now old (gnus-ancient-mark).

‘K’

Marked as killed (gnus-killed-mark).

‘X’

Marked as killed by kill files (gnus-kill-file-mark).

‘Y’

Marked as read by having too low a score (gnus-low-score-mark).

‘C’

Marked as read by a catchup (gnus-catchup-mark).

‘G’

Canceled article (gnus-canceled-mark)

‘F’

SOUPed article (gnus-souped-mark). See section SOUP.

‘Q’

Sparsely reffed article (gnus-sparse-mark). See section Customizing Threading.

‘M’

Article marked as read by duplicate suppression (gnus-duplicate-mark). See section Duplicate Suppression.

All these marks just mean that the article is marked as read, really. They are interpreted differently when doing adaptive scoring, though.

One more special mark, though:

‘E’

Marked as expirable (gnus-expirable-mark).

Marking articles as expirable (or have them marked as such automatically) doesn’t make much sense in normal groups—a user doesn’t control expiring of news articles, but in mail groups, for instance, articles marked as expirable can be deleted by Gnus at any time.

3.7.3 Other Marks

There are some marks that have nothing to do with whether the article is read or not.

• You can set a bookmark in the current article. Say you are reading a long thesis on cats’ urinary tracts, and have to go home for dinner before you’ve finished reading the thesis. You can then set a bookmark in the article, and Gnus will jump to this bookmark the next time it encounters the article. See section Setting Marks.
• All articles that you have replied to or made a followup to (i.e., have answered) will be marked with an ‘A’ in the second column (gnus-replied-mark).
• All articles that you have forwarded will be marked with an ‘F’ in the second column (gnus-forwarded-mark).
• Articles stored in the article cache will be marked with an ‘*’ in the second column (gnus-cached-mark). See section Article Caching.
• Articles “saved” (in some manner or other; not necessarily religiously) are marked with an ‘S’ in the second column (gnus-saved-mark).
• Articles that according to the server haven’t been shown to the user before are marked with a ‘N’ in the second column (gnus-recent-mark). Note that not all servers support this mark, in which case it simply never appears. Compare with gnus-unseen-mark.
• Articles that haven’t been seen before in Gnus by the user are marked with a ‘.’ in the second column (gnus-unseen-mark). Compare with gnus-recent-mark.
• When using the Gnus agent (see section Agent Basics), articles may be downloaded for unplugged (offline) viewing. If you are using the ‘%O’ spec, these articles get the ‘+’ mark in that spec. (The variable gnus-downloaded-mark controls which character to use.)
• When using the Gnus agent (see section Agent Basics), some articles might not have been downloaded. Such articles cannot be viewed while you are unplugged (offline). If you are using the ‘%O’ spec, these articles get the ‘-’ mark in that spec. (The variable gnus-undownloaded-mark controls which character to use.)
• The Gnus agent (see section Agent Basics) downloads some articles automatically, but it is also possible to explicitly mark articles for download, even if they would not be downloaded automatically. Such explicitly-marked articles get the ‘%’ mark in the first column. (The variable gnus-downloadable-mark controls which character to use.)
• If the ‘%e’ spec is used, the presence of threads or not will be marked with gnus-not-empty-thread-mark and gnus-empty-thread-mark in the third column, respectively.
• Finally we have the process mark (gnus-process-mark). A variety of commands react to the presence of the process mark. For instance, X u (gnus-uu-decode-uu) will uudecode and view all articles that have been marked with the process mark. Articles marked with the process mark have a ‘#’ in the second column.

You might have noticed that most of these “non-readedness” marks appear in the second column by default. So if you have a cached, saved, replied article that you have process-marked, what will that look like?

Nothing much. The precedence rules go as follows: process -> cache -> replied -> saved. So if the article is in the cache and is replied, you’ll only see the cache mark and not the replied mark.

3.7.4 Setting Marks

All the marking commands understand the numeric prefix.

M c

M-u

Clear all readedness-marks from the current article (gnus-summary-clear-mark-forward). In other words, mark the article as unread.

M t

!

Tick the current article (gnus-summary-tick-article-forward). See section Article Caching.

M ?

?

Mark the current article as dormant (gnus-summary-mark-as-dormant). See section Article Caching.

M d

d

Mark the current article as read (gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward).

D

Mark the current article as read and move point to the previous line (gnus-summary-mark-as-read-backward).

M k

k

Mark all articles that have the same subject as the current one as read, and then select the next unread article (gnus-summary-kill-same-subject-and-select).

M K

C-k

Mark all articles that have the same subject as the current one as read (gnus-summary-kill-same-subject).

M C

Mark all unread articles as read (gnus-summary-catchup).

M C-c

Mark all articles in the group as read—even the ticked and dormant articles (gnus-summary-catchup-all).

M H

Catchup the current group to point (before the point) (gnus-summary-catchup-to-here).

M h

Catchup the current group from point (after the point) (gnus-summary-catchup-from-here).

C-w

Mark all articles between point and mark as read (gnus-summary-mark-region-as-read).

M V k

Kill all articles with scores below the default score (or below the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-kill-below).

M e

E

Mark the current article as expirable (gnus-summary-mark-as-expirable).

M b

Set a bookmark in the current article (gnus-summary-set-bookmark).

M B

Remove the bookmark from the current article (gnus-summary-remove-bookmark).

M V c

Clear all marks from articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-clear-above).

M V u

Tick all articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-tick-above).

M V m

Prompt for a mark, and mark all articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) with this mark (gnus-summary-clear-above).

The gnus-summary-goto-unread variable controls what action should be taken after setting a mark. If non-nil, point will move to the next/previous unread article. If nil, point will just move one line up or down. As a special case, if this variable is never, all the marking commands as well as other commands (like SPACE) will move to the next article, whether it is unread or not. The default is t.

3.7.5 Generic Marking Commands

Some people would like the command that ticks an article (!) go to the next article. Others would like it to go to the next unread article. Yet others would like it to stay on the current article. And even though I haven’t heard of anybody wanting it to go to the previous (unread) article, I’m sure there are people that want that as well.

Multiply these five behaviors with five different marking commands, and you get a potentially complex set of variable to control what each command should do.

To sidestep that mess, Gnus provides commands that do all these different things. They can be found on the M M map in the summary buffer. Type M M C-h to see them all—there are too many of them to list in this manual.

While you can use these commands directly, most users would prefer altering the summary mode keymap. For instance, if you would like the ! command to go to the next article instead of the next unread article, you could say something like:

(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'my-alter-summary-map)
(defun my-alter-summary-map ()
  (local-set-key "!" 'gnus-summary-put-mark-as-ticked-next))

or

(defun my-alter-summary-map ()
  (local-set-key "!" "MM!n"))

3.7.6 Setting Process Marks

Process marks are displayed as # in the summary buffer, and are used for marking articles in such a way that other commands will process these articles. For instance, if you process mark four articles and then use the * command, Gnus will enter these four commands into the cache. For more information, see section Process/Prefix.

M P p

#

Mark the current article with the process mark (gnus-summary-mark-as-processable).

M P u

M-#

Remove the process mark, if any, from the current article (gnus-summary-unmark-as-processable).

M P U

Remove the process mark from all articles (gnus-summary-unmark-all-processable).

M P i

Invert the list of process marked articles (gnus-uu-invert-processable).

M P R

Mark articles that have a Subject header that matches a regular expression (gnus-uu-mark-by-regexp).

M P G

Unmark articles that have a Subject header that matches a regular expression (gnus-uu-unmark-by-regexp).

M P r

Mark articles in region (gnus-uu-mark-region).

M P g

Unmark articles in region (gnus-uu-unmark-region).

M P t

Mark all articles in the current (sub)thread (gnus-uu-mark-thread).

M P T

Unmark all articles in the current (sub)thread (gnus-uu-unmark-thread).

M P v

Mark all articles that have a score above the prefix argument (gnus-uu-mark-over).

M P s

Mark all articles in the current series (gnus-uu-mark-series).

M P S

Mark all series that have already had some articles marked (gnus-uu-mark-sparse).

M P a

Mark all articles in series order (gnus-uu-mark-all).

M P b

Mark all articles in the buffer in the order they appear (gnus-uu-mark-buffer).

M P k

Push the current process mark set onto the stack and unmark all articles (gnus-summary-kill-process-mark).

M P y

Pop the previous process mark set from the stack and restore it (gnus-summary-yank-process-mark).

M P w

Push the current process mark set onto the stack (gnus-summary-save-process-mark).

Also see the & command in Searching for Articles, for how to set process marks based on article body contents.

3.8 Limiting

It can be convenient to limit the summary buffer to just show some subset of the articles currently in the group. The effect most limit commands have is to remove a few (or many) articles from the summary buffer.

All limiting commands work on subsets of the articles already fetched from the servers. None of these commands query the server for additional articles.

/ /

/ s

Limit the summary buffer to articles that match some subject (gnus-summary-limit-to-subject). If given a prefix, exclude matching articles.

/ a

Limit the summary buffer to articles that match some author (gnus-summary-limit-to-author). If given a prefix, exclude matching articles.

/ x

Limit the summary buffer to articles that match one of the “extra” headers (see section To From Newsgroups) (gnus-summary-limit-to-extra). If given a prefix, exclude matching articles.

/ u

x

Limit the summary buffer to articles not marked as read (gnus-summary-limit-to-unread). If given a prefix, limit the buffer to articles strictly unread. This means that ticked and dormant articles will also be excluded.

/ m

Ask for a mark and then limit to all articles that have been marked with that mark (gnus-summary-limit-to-marks).

/ t

Ask for a number and then limit the summary buffer to articles older than (or equal to) that number of days (gnus-summary-limit-to-age). If given a prefix, limit to articles younger than that number of days.

/ n

Limit the summary buffer to the current article (gnus-summary-limit-to-articles). Uses the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).

/ w

Pop the previous limit off the stack and restore it (gnus-summary-pop-limit). If given a prefix, pop all limits off the stack.

/ .

Limit the summary buffer to the unseen articles (gnus-summary-limit-to-unseen).

/ v

Limit the summary buffer to articles that have a score at or above some score (gnus-summary-limit-to-score).

/ p

Limit the summary buffer to articles that satisfy the display group parameter predicate (gnus-summary-limit-to-display-predicate). See section Group Parameters, for more on this predicate.

/ E

M S

Include all expunged articles in the limit (gnus-summary-limit-include-expunged).

/ D

Include all dormant articles in the limit (gnus-summary-limit-include-dormant).

/ *

Include all cached articles in the limit (gnus-summary-limit-include-cached).

/ d

Exclude all dormant articles from the limit (gnus-summary-limit-exclude-dormant).

/ M

Exclude all marked articles (gnus-summary-limit-exclude-marks).

/ T

Include all the articles in the current thread in the limit.

/ c

Exclude all dormant articles that have no children from the limit
(gnus-summary-limit-exclude-childless-dormant).

/ C

Mark all excluded unread articles as read (gnus-summary-limit-mark-excluded-as-read). If given a prefix, also mark excluded ticked and dormant articles as read.

/ N

Insert all new articles in the summary buffer. It scans for new emails if back-end-get-new-mail is non-nil.

/ o

Insert all old articles in the summary buffer. If given a numbered prefix, fetch this number of articles.

3.9 Threading

Gnus threads articles by default. To thread is to put responses to articles directly after the articles they respond to—in a hierarchical fashion.

Threading is done by looking at the References headers of the articles. In a perfect world, this would be enough to build pretty trees, but unfortunately, the References header is often broken or simply missing. Weird news propagation exacerbates the problem, so one has to employ other heuristics to get pleasing results. A plethora of approaches exists, as detailed in horrible detail in Customizing Threading.

First, a quick overview of the concepts:

root

The top-most article in a thread; the first article in the thread.

thread

A tree-like article structure.

sub-thread

A small(er) section of this tree-like structure.

loose threads

Threads often lose their roots due to article expiry, or due to the root already having been read in a previous session, and not displayed in the summary buffer. We then typically have many sub-threads that really belong to one thread, but are without connecting roots. These are called loose threads.

thread gathering

An attempt to gather loose threads into bigger threads.

sparse threads

A thread where the missing articles have been “guessed” at, and are displayed as empty lines in the summary buffer.

3.9.1 Customizing Threading

3.9.1.1 Loose Threads

gnus-summary-make-false-root

If non-nil, Gnus will gather all loose subtrees into one big tree and create a dummy root at the top. (Wait a minute. Root at the top? Yup.) Loose subtrees occur when the real root has expired, or you’ve read or killed the root in a previous session.

When there is no real root of a thread, Gnus will have to fudge something. This variable says what fudging method Gnus should use. There are four possible values:

adopt

Gnus will make the first of the orphaned articles the parent. This parent will adopt all the other articles. The adopted articles will be marked as such by pointy brackets (‘<>’) instead of the standard square brackets (‘[]’). This is the default method.

dummy

Gnus will create a dummy summary line that will pretend to be the parent. This dummy line does not correspond to any real article, so selecting it will just select the first real article after the dummy article. gnus-summary-dummy-line-format is used to specify the format of the dummy roots. It accepts only one format spec: ‘S’, which is the subject of the article. See section Formatting Variables. If you want all threads to have a dummy root, even the non-gathered ones, set gnus-summary-make-false-root-always to t.

empty

Gnus won’t actually make any article the parent, but simply leave the subject field of all orphans except the first empty. (Actually, it will use gnus-summary-same-subject as the subject (see section Summary Buffer Format).)

none

Don’t make any article parent at all. Just gather the threads and display them after one another.

nil

Don’t gather loose threads.

gnus-summary-gather-subject-limit

Loose threads are gathered by comparing subjects of articles. If this variable is nil, Gnus requires an exact match between the subjects of the loose threads before gathering them into one big super-thread. This might be too strict a requirement, what with the presence of stupid newsreaders that chop off long subject lines. If you think so, set this variable to, say, 20 to require that only the first 20 characters of the subjects have to match. If you set this variable to a really low number, you’ll find that Gnus will gather everything in sight into one thread, which isn’t very helpful.

If you set this variable to the special value fuzzy, Gnus will use a fuzzy string comparison algorithm on the subjects (see section Fuzzy Matching).

gnus-simplify-subject-fuzzy-regexp

This can either be a regular expression or list of regular expressions that match strings that will be removed from subjects if fuzzy subject simplification is used.

gnus-simplify-ignored-prefixes

If you set gnus-summary-gather-subject-limit to something as low as 10, you might consider setting this variable to something sensible:

(setq gnus-simplify-ignored-prefixes (concat "\\`\\[?\\(" (mapconcat 'identity '("looking" "wanted" "followup" "summary\\( of\\)?" "help" "query" "problem" "question" "answer" "reference" "announce" "How can I" "How to" "Comparison of" ;; ... ) "\\|") "\\)\\s *\\(" (mapconcat 'identity '("for" "for reference" "with" "about") "\\|") "\\)?\\]?:?[ \t]*"))

All words that match this regexp will be removed before comparing two subjects.

gnus-simplify-subject-functions

If non-nil, this variable overrides gnus-summary-gather-subject-limit. This variable should be a list of functions to apply to the Subject string iteratively to arrive at the simplified version of the string.

Useful functions to put in this list include:

gnus-simplify-subject-re

Strip the leading ‘Re:’.

gnus-simplify-subject-fuzzy

Simplify fuzzily.

gnus-simplify-whitespace

Remove excessive whitespace.

gnus-simplify-all-whitespace

Remove all whitespace.

You may also write your own functions, of course.

gnus-summary-gather-exclude-subject

Since loose thread gathering is done on subjects only, that might lead to many false hits, especially with certain common subjects like ‘’ and ‘(none)’. To make the situation slightly better, you can use the regexp gnus-summary-gather-exclude-subject to say what subjects should be excluded from the gathering process.
The default is ‘^ *$\\|^(none)$’.

gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function

Gnus gathers threads by looking at Subject headers. This means that totally unrelated articles may end up in the same “thread”, which is confusing. An alternate approach is to look at all the Message-IDs in all the References headers to find matches. This will ensure that no gathered threads ever include unrelated articles, but it also means that people who have posted with broken newsreaders won’t be gathered properly. The choice is yours—plague or cholera:

gnus-gather-threads-by-subject

This function is the default gathering function and looks at Subjects exclusively.

gnus-gather-threads-by-references

This function looks at References headers exclusively.

If you want to test gathering by References, you could say something like:

(setq gnus-summary-thread-gathering-function 'gnus-gather-threads-by-references)

3.9.1.2 Filling In Threads

gnus-fetch-old-headers

If non-nil, Gnus will attempt to build old threads by fetching more old headers—headers to articles marked as read. If you would like to display as few summary lines as possible, but still connect as many loose threads as possible, you should set this variable to some or a number. If you set it to a number, no more than that number of extra old headers will be fetched. In either case, fetching old headers only works if the back end you are using carries overview files—this would normally be nntp, nnspool, nnml, and nnmaildir. Also remember that if the root of the thread has been expired by the server, there’s not much Gnus can do about that.

This variable can also be set to invisible. This won’t have any visible effects, but is useful if you use the A T command a lot (see section Finding the Parent).

gnus-fetch-old-ephemeral-headers

Same as gnus-fetch-old-headers, but only used for ephemeral newsgroups.

gnus-build-sparse-threads

Fetching old headers can be slow. A low-rent similar effect can be gotten by setting this variable to some. Gnus will then look at the complete References headers of all articles and try to string together articles that belong in the same thread. This will leave gaps in the threading display where Gnus guesses that an article is missing from the thread. (These gaps appear like normal summary lines. If you select a gap, Gnus will try to fetch the article in question.) If this variable is t, Gnus will display all these “gaps” without regard for whether they are useful for completing the thread or not. Finally, if this variable is more, Gnus won’t cut off sparse leaf nodes that don’t lead anywhere. This variable is nil by default.

gnus-read-all-available-headers

This is a rather obscure variable that few will find useful. It’s intended for those non-news newsgroups where the back end has to fetch quite a lot to present the summary buffer, and where it’s impossible to go back to parents of articles. This is mostly the case in the web-based groups, like the nnultimate groups.

If you don’t use those, then it’s safe to leave this as the default nil. If you want to use this variable, it should be a regexp that matches the group name, or t for all groups.

3.9.1.3 More Threading

gnus-show-threads

If this variable is nil, no threading will be done, and all of the rest of the variables here will have no effect. Turning threading off will speed group selection up a bit, but it is sure to make reading slower and more awkward.

gnus-thread-hide-subtree

If non-nil, all threads will be hidden when the summary buffer is generated.

This can also be a predicate specifier (see section Predicate Specifiers). Available predicates are gnus-article-unread-p and gnus-article-unseen-p.

Here’s an example:

(setq gnus-thread-hide-subtree '(or gnus-article-unread-p gnus-article-unseen-p))

(It’s a pretty nonsensical example, since all unseen articles are also unread, but you get my drift.)

gnus-thread-expunge-below

All threads that have a total score (as defined by gnus-thread-score-function) less than this number will be expunged. This variable is nil by default, which means that no threads are expunged.

gnus-thread-hide-killed

if you kill a thread and this variable is non-nil, the subtree will be hidden.

gnus-thread-ignore-subject

Sometimes somebody changes the subject in the middle of a thread. If this variable is non-nil, which is the default, the subject change is ignored. If it is nil, a change in the subject will result in a new thread.

gnus-thread-indent-level

This is a number that says how much each sub-thread should be indented. The default is 4.

gnus-sort-gathered-threads-function

Sometimes, particularly with mailing lists, the order in which mails arrive locally is not necessarily the same as the order in which they arrived on the mailing list. Consequently, when sorting sub-threads using the default gnus-thread-sort-by-number, responses can end up appearing before the article to which they are responding to. Setting this variable to an alternate value (e.g. gnus-thread-sort-by-date), in a group’s parameters or in an appropriate hook (e.g. gnus-summary-generate-hook) can produce a more logical sub-thread ordering in such instances.

3.9.1.4 Low-Level Threading

gnus-parse-headers-hook

Hook run before parsing any headers.

gnus-alter-header-function

If non-nil, this function will be called to allow alteration of article header structures. The function is called with one parameter, the article header vector, which it may alter in any way. For instance, if you have a mail-to-news gateway which alters the Message-IDs in systematic ways (by adding prefixes and such), you can use this variable to un-scramble the Message-IDs so that they are more meaningful. Here’s one example:

(setq gnus-alter-header-function 'my-alter-message-id) (defun my-alter-message-id (header) (let ((id (mail-header-id header))) (when (string-match "\\(<[^<>@]*\\)\\.?cygnus\\..*@\\([^<>@]*>\\)" id) (mail-header-set-id (concat (match-string 1 id) "@" (match-string 2 id)) header))))

3.9.2 Thread Commands

T k

C-M-k

Mark all articles in the current (sub-)thread as read (gnus-summary-kill-thread). If the prefix argument is positive, remove all marks instead. If the prefix argument is negative, tick articles instead.

T l

C-M-l

Lower the score of the current (sub-)thread (gnus-summary-lower-thread).

T i

Increase the score of the current (sub-)thread (gnus-summary-raise-thread).

T #

Set the process mark on the current (sub-)thread (gnus-uu-mark-thread).

T M-#

Remove the process mark from the current (sub-)thread (gnus-uu-unmark-thread).

T T

Toggle threading (gnus-summary-toggle-threads).

T s

Expose the (sub-)thread hidden under the current article, if any
(gnus-summary-show-thread).

T h

Hide the current (sub-)thread (gnus-summary-hide-thread).

T S

Expose all hidden threads (gnus-summary-show-all-threads).

T H

Hide all threads (gnus-summary-hide-all-threads).

T t

Re-thread the current article’s thread (gnus-summary-rethread-current). This works even when the summary buffer is otherwise unthreaded.

T ^

Make the current article the child of the marked (or previous) article (gnus-summary-reparent-thread).

The following commands are thread movement commands. They all understand the numeric prefix.

T n

C-M-f

M-down

Go to the next thread (gnus-summary-next-thread).

T p

C-M-b

M-up

Go to the previous thread (gnus-summary-prev-thread).

T d

Descend the thread (gnus-summary-down-thread).

T u

Ascend the thread (gnus-summary-up-thread).

T o

Go to the top of the thread (gnus-summary-top-thread).

If you ignore subject while threading, you’ll naturally end up with threads that have several different subjects in them. If you then issue a command like T k (gnus-summary-kill-thread) you might not wish to kill the entire thread, but just those parts of the thread that have the same subject as the current article. If you like this idea, you can fiddle with gnus-thread-operation-ignore-subject. If it is non-nil (which it is by default), subjects will be ignored when doing thread commands. If this variable is nil, articles in the same thread with different subjects will not be included in the operation in question. If this variable is fuzzy, only articles that have subjects fuzzily equal will be included (see section Fuzzy Matching).

3.10 Sorting the Summary Buffer

If you are using a threaded summary display, you can sort the threads by setting gnus-thread-sort-functions, which can be either a single function, a list of functions, or a list containing functions and (not some-function) elements.

By default, sorting is done on article numbers. Ready-made sorting predicate functions include gnus-thread-sort-by-number, gnus-thread-sort-by-author, gnus-thread-sort-by-subject, gnus-thread-sort-by-date, gnus-thread-sort-by-score, gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-number, gnus-thread-sort-by-most-recent-date, gnus-thread-sort-by-random and gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score.

Each function takes two threads and returns non-nil if the first thread should be sorted before the other. Note that sorting really is normally done by looking only at the roots of each thread.

If you use more than one function, the primary sort key should be the last function in the list. You should probably always include gnus-thread-sort-by-number in the list of sorting functions—preferably first. This will ensure that threads that are equal with respect to the other sort criteria will be displayed in ascending article order.

If you would like to sort by reverse score, then by subject, and finally by number, you could do something like:

(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions
      '(gnus-thread-sort-by-number
        gnus-thread-sort-by-subject
        (not gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score)))

The threads that have highest score will be displayed first in the summary buffer. When threads have the same score, they will be sorted alphabetically. The threads that have the same score and the same subject will be sorted by number, which is (normally) the sequence in which the articles arrived.

If you want to sort by score and then reverse arrival order, you could say something like:

(setq gnus-thread-sort-functions
      '((lambda (t1 t2)
          (not (gnus-thread-sort-by-number t1 t2)))
        gnus-thread-sort-by-score))

The function in the gnus-thread-score-function variable (default +) is used for calculating the total score of a thread. Useful functions might be max, min, or squared means, or whatever tickles your fancy.

If you are using an unthreaded display for some strange reason or other, you have to fiddle with the gnus-article-sort-functions variable. It is very similar to the gnus-thread-sort-functions, except that it uses slightly different functions for article comparison. Available sorting predicate functions are gnus-article-sort-by-number, gnus-article-sort-by-author, gnus-article-sort-by-subject, gnus-article-sort-by-date, gnus-article-sort-by-random, and gnus-article-sort-by-score.

If you want to sort an unthreaded summary display by subject, you could say something like:

(setq gnus-article-sort-functions
      '(gnus-article-sort-by-number
        gnus-article-sort-by-subject))

3.11 Asynchronous Article Fetching

If you read your news from an NNTP server that’s far away, the network latencies may make reading articles a chore. You have to wait for a while after pressing n to go to the next article before the article appears. Why can’t Gnus just go ahead and fetch the article while you are reading the previous one? Why not, indeed.

First, some caveats. There are some pitfalls to using asynchronous article fetching, especially the way Gnus does it.

Let’s say you are reading article 1, which is short, and article 2 is quite long, and you are not interested in reading that. Gnus does not know this, so it goes ahead and fetches article 2. You decide to read article 3, but since Gnus is in the process of fetching article 2, the connection is blocked.

To avoid these situations, Gnus will open two (count ’em two) connections to the server. Some people may think this isn’t a very nice thing to do, but I don’t see any real alternatives. Setting up that extra connection takes some time, so Gnus startup will be slower.

Gnus will fetch more articles than you will read. This will mean that the link between your machine and the NNTP server will become more loaded than if you didn’t use article pre-fetch. The server itself will also become more loaded—both with the extra article requests, and the extra connection.

Ok, so now you know that you shouldn’t really use this thing… unless you really want to.

Here’s how: Set gnus-asynchronous to t. The rest should happen automatically.

You can control how many articles are to be pre-fetched by setting gnus-use-article-prefetch. This is 30 by default, which means that when you read an article in the group, the back end will pre-fetch the next 30 articles. If this variable is t, the back end will pre-fetch all the articles it can without bound. If it is nil, no pre-fetching will be done.

There are probably some articles that you don’t want to pre-fetch—read articles, for instance. The gnus-async-prefetch-article-p variable controls whether an article is to be pre-fetched. This function should return non-nil when the article in question is to be pre-fetched. The default is gnus-async-read-p, which returns nil on read articles. The function is called with an article data structure as the only parameter.

If, for instance, you wish to pre-fetch only unread articles shorter than 100 lines, you could say something like:

(defun my-async-short-unread-p (data)
  "Return non-nil for short, unread articles."
  (and (gnus-data-unread-p data)
       (< (mail-header-lines (gnus-data-header data))
          100)))

(setq gnus-async-prefetch-article-p 'my-async-short-unread-p)

These functions will be called many, many times, so they should preferably be short and sweet to avoid slowing down Gnus too much. It’s probably a good idea to byte-compile things like this.

Articles have to be removed from the asynch buffer sooner or later. The gnus-prefetched-article-deletion-strategy says when to remove articles. This is a list that may contain the following elements:

read

Remove articles when they are read.

exit

Remove articles when exiting the group.

The default value is (read exit).

3.12 Article Caching

If you have an extremely slow NNTP connection, you may consider turning article caching on. Each article will then be stored locally under your home directory. As you may surmise, this could potentially use huge amounts of disk space, as well as eat up all your inodes so fast it will make your head swim. In vodka.

Used carefully, though, it could be just an easier way to save articles.

To turn caching on, set gnus-use-cache to t. By default, all articles ticked or marked as dormant will then be copied over to your local cache (gnus-cache-directory). Whether this cache is flat or hierarchical is controlled by the gnus-use-long-file-name variable, as usual.

When re-selecting a ticked or dormant article, it will be fetched from the cache instead of from the server. As articles in your cache will never expire, this might serve as a method of saving articles while still keeping them where they belong. Just mark all articles you want to save as dormant, and don’t worry.

When an article is marked as read, is it removed from the cache.

The entering/removal of articles from the cache is controlled by the gnus-cache-enter-articles and gnus-cache-remove-articles variables. Both are lists of symbols. The first is (ticked dormant) by default, meaning that ticked and dormant articles will be put in the cache. The latter is (read) by default, meaning that articles marked as read are removed from the cache. Possibly symbols in these two lists are ticked, dormant, unread and read.

So where does the massive article-fetching and storing come into the picture? The gnus-jog-cache command will go through all subscribed newsgroups, request all unread articles, score them, and store them in the cache. You should only ever, ever ever ever, use this command if 1) your connection to the NNTP server is really, really, really slow and 2) you have a really, really, really huge disk. Seriously. One way to cut down on the number of articles downloaded is to score unwanted articles down and have them marked as read. They will not then be downloaded by this command.

It is likely that you do not want caching on all groups. For instance, if your nnml mail is located under your home directory, it makes no sense to cache it somewhere else under your home directory. Unless you feel that it’s neat to use twice as much space.

To limit the caching, you could set gnus-cacheable-groups to a regexp of groups to cache, ‘^nntp’ for instance, or set the gnus-uncacheable-groups regexp to ‘^nnml’, for instance. Both variables are nil by default. If a group matches both variables, the group is not cached.

The cache stores information on what articles it contains in its active file (gnus-cache-active-file). If this file (or any other parts of the cache) becomes all messed up for some reason or other, Gnus offers two functions that will try to set things right. M-x gnus-cache-generate-nov-databases will (re)build all the NOV files, and gnus-cache-generate-active will (re)generate the active file.

gnus-cache-move-cache will move your whole gnus-cache-directory to some other location. You get asked to where, isn’t that cool?

3.13 Persistent Articles

Closely related to article caching, we have persistent articles. In fact, it’s just a different way of looking at caching, and much more useful in my opinion.

Say you’re reading a newsgroup, and you happen on to some valuable gem that you want to keep and treasure forever. You’d normally just save it (using one of the many saving commands) in some file. The problem with that is that it’s just, well, yucky. Ideally you’d prefer just having the article remain in the group where you found it forever; untouched by the expiry going on at the news server.

This is what a persistent article is—an article that just won’t be deleted. It’s implemented using the normal cache functions, but you use two explicit commands for managing persistent articles:

*

Make the current article persistent (gnus-cache-enter-article).

M-*

Remove the current article from the persistent articles (gnus-cache-remove-article). This will normally delete the article.

Both these commands understand the process/prefix convention.

To avoid having all ticked articles (and stuff) entered into the cache, you should set gnus-use-cache to passive if you’re just interested in persistent articles:

(setq gnus-use-cache 'passive)

3.14 Article Backlog

If you have a slow connection, but the idea of using caching seems unappealing to you (and it is, really), you can help the situation some by switching on the backlog. This is where Gnus will buffer already read articles so that it doesn’t have to re-fetch articles you’ve already read. This only helps if you are in the habit of re-selecting articles you’ve recently read, of course. If you never do that, turning the backlog on will slow Gnus down a little bit, and increase memory usage some.

If you set gnus-keep-backlog to a number n, Gnus will store at most n old articles in a buffer for later re-fetching. If this variable is non-nil and is not a number, Gnus will store all read articles, which means that your Emacs will grow without bound before exploding and taking your machine down with you. I put that in there just to keep y’all on your toes.

The default value is 20.

3.15 Saving Articles

Gnus can save articles in a number of ways. Below is the documentation for saving articles in a fairly straight-forward fashion (i.e., little processing of the article is done before it is saved). For a different approach (uudecoding, unsharing) you should use gnus-uu (see section Decoding Articles).

For the commands listed here, the target is a file. If you want to save to a group, see the B c (gnus-summary-copy-article) command (see section Mail Group Commands).

If gnus-save-all-headers is non-nil, Gnus will not delete unwanted headers before saving the article.

If the preceding variable is nil, all headers that match the gnus-saved-headers regexp will be kept, while the rest will be deleted before saving.

O o

o

Save the current article using the default article saver (gnus-summary-save-article).

O m

Save the current article in mail format (gnus-summary-save-article-mail).

O r

Save the current article in Rmail format (gnus-summary-save-article-rmail).

O f

Save the current article in plain file format (gnus-summary-save-article-file).

O F

Write the current article in plain file format, overwriting any previous file contents (gnus-summary-write-article-file).

O b

Save the current article body in plain file format (gnus-summary-save-article-body-file).

O h

Save the current article in mh folder format (gnus-summary-save-article-folder).

O v

Save the current article in a VM folder (gnus-summary-save-article-vm).

O p

|

Save the current article in a pipe. Uhm, like, what I mean is—Pipe the current article to a process (gnus-summary-pipe-output). If given a symbolic prefix (see section Symbolic Prefixes), include the complete headers in the piped output.

O P

Save the current article into muttprint. That is, print it using the external program Muttprint. The program name and options to use is controlled by the variable gnus-summary-muttprint-program. (gnus-summary-muttprint).

All these commands use the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix). If you save bunches of articles using these functions, you might get tired of being prompted for files to save each and every article in. The prompting action is controlled by the gnus-prompt-before-saving variable, which is always by default, giving you that excessive prompting action you know and loathe. If you set this variable to t instead, you’ll be prompted just once for each series of articles you save. If you like to really have Gnus do all your thinking for you, you can even set this variable to nil, which means that you will never be prompted for files to save articles in. Gnus will simply save all the articles in the default files.

You can customize the gnus-default-article-saver variable to make Gnus do what you want it to. You can use any of the six ready-made functions below, or you can create your own.

gnus-summary-save-in-rmail

This is the default format, Babyl. Uses the function in the gnus-rmail-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-plain-save-name.

gnus-summary-save-in-mail

Save in a Unix mail (mbox) file. Uses the function in the gnus-mail-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-plain-save-name.

gnus-summary-save-in-file

Append the article straight to an ordinary file. Uses the function in the gnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.

gnus-summary-write-to-file

Write the article straight to an ordinary file. The file is overwritten if it exists. Uses the function in the gnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.

gnus-summary-save-body-in-file

Append the article body to an ordinary file. Uses the function in the gnus-file-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-numeric-save-name.

gnus-summary-save-in-folder

Save the article to an MH folder using rcvstore from the MH library. Uses the function in the gnus-folder-save-name variable to get a file name to save the article in. The default is gnus-folder-save-name, but you can also use gnus-Folder-save-name, which creates capitalized names.

gnus-summary-save-in-vm

Save the article in a VM folder. You have to have the VM mail reader to use this setting.

All of these functions, except for the last one, will save the article in the gnus-article-save-directory, which is initialized from the SAVEDIR environment variable. This is ‘~/News/’ by default.

As you can see above, the functions use different functions to find a suitable name of a file to save the article in. Below is a list of available functions that generate names:

gnus-Numeric-save-name

File names like ‘~/News/Alt.andrea-dworkin/45’.

gnus-numeric-save-name

File names like ‘~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin/45’.

gnus-Plain-save-name

File names like ‘~/News/Alt.andrea-dworkin’.

gnus-plain-save-name

File names like ‘~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin’.

gnus-sender-save-name

File names like ‘~/News/larsi’.

You can have Gnus suggest where to save articles by plonking a regexp into the gnus-split-methods alist. For instance, if you would like to save articles related to Gnus in the file ‘gnus-stuff’, and articles related to VM in ‘vm-stuff’, you could set this variable to something like:

(("^Subject:.*gnus\\|^Newsgroups:.*gnus" "gnus-stuff")
 ("^Subject:.*vm\\|^Xref:.*vm" "vm-stuff")
 (my-choosing-function "../other-dir/my-stuff")
 ((equal gnus-newsgroup-name "mail.misc") "mail-stuff"))

We see that this is a list where each element is a list that has two elements—the match and the file. The match can either be a string (in which case it is used as a regexp to match on the article head); it can be a symbol (which will be called as a function with the group name as a parameter); or it can be a list (which will be evaled). If any of these actions have a non-nil result, the file will be used as a default prompt. In addition, the result of the operation itself will be used if the function or form called returns a string or a list of strings.

You basically end up with a list of file names that might be used when saving the current article. (All “matches” will be used.) You will then be prompted for what you really want to use as a name, with file name completion over the results from applying this variable.

This variable is ((gnus-article-archive-name)) by default, which means that Gnus will look at the articles it saves for an Archive-name line and use that as a suggestion for the file name.

Here’s an example function to clean up file names somewhat. If you have lots of mail groups called things like ‘nnml:mail.whatever’, you may want to chop off the beginning of these group names before creating the file name to save to. The following will do just that:

(defun my-save-name (group)
  (when (string-match "^nnml:mail." group)
    (substring group (match-end 0))))

(setq gnus-split-methods
      '((gnus-article-archive-name)
        (my-save-name)))

Finally, you have the gnus-use-long-file-name variable. If it is nil, all the preceding functions will replace all periods (‘.’) in the group names with slashes (‘/’)—which means that the functions will generate hierarchies of directories instead of having all the files in the top level directory (‘~/News/alt/andrea-dworkin’ instead of ‘~/News/alt.andrea-dworkin’.) This variable is t by default on most systems. However, for historical reasons, this is nil on Xenix and usg-unix-v machines by default.

This function also affects kill and score file names. If this variable is a list, and the list contains the element not-score, long file names will not be used for score files, if it contains the element not-save, long file names will not be used for saving, and if it contains the element not-kill, long file names will not be used for kill files.

If you’d like to save articles in a hierarchy that looks something like a spool, you could

(setq gnus-use-long-file-name '(not-save)) ; to get a hierarchy
(setq gnus-default-article-saver
      'gnus-summary-save-in-file)          ; no encoding

Then just save with o. You’d then read this hierarchy with ephemeral nneething groups—G D in the group buffer, and the top level directory as the argument (‘~/News/’). Then just walk around to the groups/directories with nneething.

3.16 Decoding Articles

Sometime users post articles (or series of articles) that have been encoded in some way or other. Gnus can decode them for you.

All these functions use the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix) for finding out what articles to work on, with the extension that a “single article” means “a single series”. Gnus can find out by itself what articles belong to a series, decode all the articles and unpack/view/save the resulting file(s).

Gnus guesses what articles are in the series according to the following simplish rule: The subjects must be (nearly) identical, except for the last two numbers of the line. (Spaces are largely ignored, however.)

For example: If you choose a subject called ‘cat.gif (2/3)’, Gnus will find all the articles that match the regexp ‘^cat.gif ([0-9]+/[0-9]+).*$’.

Subjects that are non-standard, like ‘cat.gif (2/3) Part 6 of a series’, will not be properly recognized by any of the automatic viewing commands, and you have to mark the articles manually with #.

3.16.1 Uuencoded Articles

X u

Uudecodes the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu).

X U

Uudecodes and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save).

X v u

Uudecodes and views the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu-view).

X v U

Uudecodes, views and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save-view).

Remember that these all react to the presence of articles marked with the process mark. If, for instance, you’d like to decode and save an entire newsgroup, you’d typically do M P a (gnus-uu-mark-all) and then X U (gnus-uu-decode-uu-and-save).

All this is very much different from how gnus-uu worked with GNUS 4.1, where you had explicit keystrokes for everything under the sun. This version of gnus-uu generally assumes that you mark articles in some way (see section Setting Process Marks) and then press X u.

Note: When trying to decode articles that have names matching gnus-uu-notify-files, which is hard-coded to ‘[Cc][Ii][Nn][Dd][Yy][0-9]+.\\(gif\\|jpg\\)’, gnus-uu will automatically post an article on ‘comp.unix.wizards’ saying that you have just viewed the file in question. This feature can’t be turned off.

3.16.2 Shell Archives

Shell archives (“shar files”) used to be a popular way to distribute sources, but it isn’t used all that much today. In any case, we have some commands to deal with these:

X s

Unshars the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar).

X S

Unshars and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save).

X v s

Unshars and views the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-view).

X v S

Unshars, views and saves the current series (gnus-uu-decode-unshar-and-save-view).

3.16.3 PostScript Files

X p

Unpack the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript).

X P

Unpack and save the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save).

X v p

View the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript-view).

X v P

View and save the current PostScript series (gnus-uu-decode-postscript-and-save-view).

3.16.4 Other Files

X o

Save the current series (gnus-uu-decode-save).

X b

Unbinhex the current series (gnus-uu-decode-binhex). This doesn’t really work yet.

3.16.5 Decoding Variables

Adjective, not verb.

3.16.5.1 Rule Variables

Gnus uses rule variables to decide how to view a file. All these variables are of the form

      (list '(regexp1 command2)
            '(regexp2 command2)
            ...)

gnus-uu-user-view-rules

This variable is consulted first when viewing files. If you wish to use, for instance, sox to convert an ‘.au’ sound file, you could say something like:

(setq gnus-uu-user-view-rules (list '("\\\\.au$" "sox %s -t .aiff > /dev/audio")))

gnus-uu-user-view-rules-end

This variable is consulted if Gnus couldn’t make any matches from the user and default view rules.

gnus-uu-user-archive-rules

This variable can be used to say what commands should be used to unpack archives.

3.16.5.2 Other Decode Variables

gnus-uu-grabbed-file-functions

All functions in this list will be called right after each file has been successfully decoded—so that you can move or view files right away, and don’t have to wait for all files to be decoded before you can do anything. Ready-made functions you can put in this list are:

gnus-uu-grab-view

View the file.

gnus-uu-grab-move

Move the file (if you’re using a saving function.)

gnus-uu-be-dangerous

Specifies what to do if unusual situations arise during decoding. If nil, be as conservative as possible. If t, ignore things that didn’t work, and overwrite existing files. Otherwise, ask each time.

gnus-uu-ignore-files-by-name

Files with name matching this regular expression won’t be viewed.

gnus-uu-ignore-files-by-type

Files with a MIME type matching this variable won’t be viewed. Note that Gnus tries to guess what type the file is based on the name. gnus-uu is not a MIME package (yet), so this is slightly kludgey.

gnus-uu-tmp-dir

Where gnus-uu does its work.

gnus-uu-do-not-unpack-archives

Non-nil means that gnus-uu won’t peek inside archives looking for files to display.

gnus-uu-view-and-save

Non-nil means that the user will always be asked to save a file after viewing it.

gnus-uu-ignore-default-view-rules

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will ignore the default viewing rules.

gnus-uu-ignore-default-archive-rules

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will ignore the default archive unpacking commands.

gnus-uu-kill-carriage-return

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will strip all carriage returns from articles.

gnus-uu-unmark-articles-not-decoded

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will mark unsuccessfully decoded articles as unread.

gnus-uu-correct-stripped-uucode

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will try to fix uuencoded files that have had trailing spaces deleted.

gnus-uu-pre-uudecode-hook

Hook run before sending a message to uudecode.

gnus-uu-view-with-metamail

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will ignore the viewing commands defined by the rule variables and just fudge a MIME content type based on the file name. The result will be fed to metamail for viewing.

gnus-uu-save-in-digest

Non-nil means that gnus-uu, when asked to save without decoding, will save in digests. If this variable is nil, gnus-uu will just save everything in a file without any embellishments. The digesting almost conforms to RFC 1153—no easy way to specify any meaningful volume and issue numbers were found, so I simply dropped them.

3.16.5.3 Uuencoding and Posting

gnus-uu-post-include-before-composing

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will ask for a file to encode before you compose the article. If this variable is t, you can either include an encoded file with C-c C-i or have one included for you when you post the article.

gnus-uu-post-length

Maximum length of an article. The encoded file will be split into how many articles it takes to post the entire file.

gnus-uu-post-threaded

Non-nil means that gnus-uu will post the encoded file in a thread. This may not be smart, as no other decoder I have seen is able to follow threads when collecting uuencoded articles. (Well, I have seen one package that does that—gnus-uu, but somehow, I don’t think that counts…) Default is nil.

gnus-uu-post-separate-description

Non-nil means that the description will be posted in a separate article. The first article will typically be numbered (0/x). If this variable is nil, the description the user enters will be included at the beginning of the first article, which will be numbered (1/x). Default is t.

3.16.6 Viewing Files

After decoding, if the file is some sort of archive, Gnus will attempt to unpack the archive and see if any of the files in the archive can be viewed. For instance, if you have a gzipped tar file ‘pics.tar.gz’ containing the files ‘pic1.jpg’ and ‘pic2.gif’, Gnus will uncompress and de-tar the main file, and then view the two pictures. This unpacking process is recursive, so if the archive contains archives of archives, it’ll all be unpacked.

Finally, Gnus will normally insert a pseudo-article for each extracted file into the summary buffer. If you go to these “articles”, you will be prompted for a command to run (usually Gnus will make a suggestion), and then the command will be run.

If gnus-view-pseudo-asynchronously is nil, Emacs will wait until the viewing is done before proceeding.

If gnus-view-pseudos is automatic, Gnus will not insert the pseudo-articles into the summary buffer, but view them immediately. If this variable is not-confirm, the user won’t even be asked for a confirmation before viewing is done.

If gnus-view-pseudos-separately is non-nil, one pseudo-article will be created for each file to be viewed. If nil, all files that use the same viewing command will be given as a list of parameters to that command.

If gnus-insert-pseudo-articles is non-nil, insert pseudo-articles when decoding. It is t by default.

So; there you are, reading your pseudo-articles in your virtual newsgroup from the virtual server; and you think: Why isn’t anything real anymore? How did we get here?

3.17 Article Treatment

Reading through this huge manual, you may have quite forgotten that the object of newsreaders is to actually, like, read what people have written. Reading articles. Unfortunately, people are quite bad at writing, so there are tons of functions and variables to make reading these articles easier.

3.17.1 Article Highlighting

Not only do you want your article buffer to look like fruit salad, but you want it to look like technicolor fruit salad.

W H a

Do much highlighting of the current article (gnus-article-highlight). This function highlights header, cited text, the signature, and adds buttons to the body and the head.

W H h

Highlight the headers (gnus-article-highlight-headers). The highlighting will be done according to the gnus-header-face-alist variable, which is a list where each element has the form (regexp name content). regexp is a regular expression for matching the header, name is the face used for highlighting the header name (see section Faces and Fonts) and content is the face for highlighting the header value. The first match made will be used. Note that regexp shouldn’t have ‘^’ prepended—Gnus will add one.

W H c

Highlight cited text (gnus-article-highlight-citation).

Some variables to customize the citation highlights:

gnus-cite-parse-max-size

If the article size if bigger than this variable (which is 25000 by default), no citation highlighting will be performed.

gnus-cite-max-prefix

Maximum possible length for a citation prefix (default 20).

gnus-cite-face-list

List of faces used for highlighting citations (see section Faces and Fonts). When there are citations from multiple articles in the same message, Gnus will try to give each citation from each article its own face. This should make it easier to see who wrote what.

gnus-supercite-regexp

Regexp matching normal Supercite attribution lines.

gnus-supercite-secondary-regexp

Regexp matching mangled Supercite attribution lines.

gnus-cite-minimum-match-count

Minimum number of identical prefixes we have to see before we believe that it’s a citation.

gnus-cite-attribution-prefix

Regexp matching the beginning of an attribution line.

gnus-cite-attribution-suffix

Regexp matching the end of an attribution line.

gnus-cite-attribution-face

Face used for attribution lines. It is merged with the face for the cited text belonging to the attribution.

gnus-cite-ignore-quoted-from

If non-nil, no citation highlighting will be performed on lines beginning with ‘>From ’. Those lines may have been quoted by MTAs in order not to mix up with the envelope From line. The default value is t.

W H s

Highlight the signature (gnus-article-highlight-signature). Everything after gnus-signature-separator (see section Article Signature) in an article will be considered a signature and will be highlighted with gnus-signature-face, which is italic by default.

See section Customizing Articles, for how to highlight articles automatically.

3.17.2 Article Fontisizing

People commonly add emphasis to words in news articles by writing things like ‘_this_’ or ‘*this*’ or ‘/this/’. Gnus can make this look nicer by running the article through the W e (gnus-article-emphasize) command.

How the emphasis is computed is controlled by the gnus-emphasis-alist variable. This is an alist where the first element is a regular expression to be matched. The second is a number that says what regular expression grouping is used to find the entire emphasized word. The third is a number that says what regexp grouping should be displayed and highlighted. (The text between these two groupings will be hidden.) The fourth is the face used for highlighting.

(setq gnus-emphasis-alist
      '(("_\\(\\w+\\)_" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-underline)
        ("\\*\\(\\w+\\)\\*" 0 1 gnus-emphasis-bold)))

By default, there are seven rules, and they use the following faces: gnus-emphasis-bold, gnus-emphasis-italic, gnus-emphasis-underline, gnus-emphasis-bold-italic, gnus-emphasis-underline-italic, gnus-emphasis-underline-bold, and gnus-emphasis-underline-bold-italic.

If you want to change these faces, you can either use M-x customize, or you can use copy-face. For instance, if you want to make gnus-emphasis-italic use a red face instead, you could say something like:

(copy-face 'red 'gnus-emphasis-italic)

If you want to highlight arbitrary words, you can use the gnus-group-highlight-words-alist variable, which uses the same syntax as gnus-emphasis-alist. The highlight-words group parameter (see section Group Parameters) can also be used.

See section Customizing Articles, for how to fontize articles automatically.

3.17.3 Article Hiding

Or rather, hiding certain things in each article. There usually is much too much cruft in most articles.

W W a

Do quite a lot of hiding on the article buffer (gnus-article-hide). In particular, this function will hide headers, PGP, cited text and the signature.

W W h

Hide headers (gnus-article-hide-headers). See section Hiding Headers.

W W b

Hide headers that aren’t particularly interesting (gnus-article-hide-boring-headers). See section Hiding Headers.

W W s

Hide signature (gnus-article-hide-signature). See section Article Signature.

W W l

Strip list identifiers specified in gnus-list-identifiers. These are strings some mailing list servers add to the beginning of all Subject headers—for example, ‘[zebra 4711]’. Any leading ‘Re: ’ is skipped before stripping. gnus-list-identifiers may not contain \\(..\\).

gnus-list-identifiers

A regular expression that matches list identifiers to be removed from subject. This can also be a list of regular expressions.

W W P

Hide PEM (privacy enhanced messages) cruft (gnus-article-hide-pem).

W W B

Strip the banner specified by the banner group parameter (gnus-article-strip-banner). This is mainly used to hide those annoying banners and/or signatures that some mailing lists and moderated groups adds to all the messages. The way to use this function is to add the banner group parameter (see section Group Parameters) to the group you want banners stripped from. The parameter either be a string, which will be interpreted as a regular expression matching text to be removed, or the symbol signature, meaning that the (last) signature should be removed, or other symbol, meaning that the corresponding regular expression in gnus-article-banner-alist is used.

Regardless of a group, you can hide things like advertisements only when the sender of an article has a certain mail address specified in gnus-article-address-banner-alist.

gnus-article-address-banner-alist

Alist of mail addresses and banners. Each element has the form (address . banner), where address is a regexp matching a mail address in the From header, banner is one of a symbol signature, an item in gnus-article-banner-alist, a regexp and nil. If address matches author’s mail address, it will remove things like advertisements. For example, if a sender has the mail address ‘hail@yoo-hoo.co.jp’ and there is a banner something like ‘Do You Yoo-hoo!?’ in all articles he sends, you can use the following element to remove them:

("@yoo-hoo\\.co\\.jp\\'" . "\n_+\nDo You Yoo-hoo!\\?\n.*\n.*\n")

W W c

Hide citation (gnus-article-hide-citation). Some variables for customizing the hiding:

gnus-cited-opened-text-button-line-format

gnus-cited-closed-text-button-line-format

Gnus adds buttons to show where the cited text has been hidden, and to allow toggle hiding the text. The format of the variable is specified by these format-like variable (see section Formatting Variables). These specs are valid:

‘b’

Starting point of the hidden text.

‘e’

Ending point of the hidden text.

‘l’

Number of characters in the hidden region.

‘n’

Number of lines of hidden text.

gnus-cited-lines-visible

The number of lines at the beginning of the cited text to leave shown. This can also be a cons cell with the number of lines at the top and bottom of the text, respectively, to remain visible.

W W C-c

Hide citation (gnus-article-hide-citation-maybe) depending on the following two variables:

gnus-cite-hide-percentage

If the cited text is of a bigger percentage than this variable (default 50), hide the cited text.

gnus-cite-hide-absolute

The cited text must have at least this length (default 10) before it is hidden.

W W C

Hide cited text in articles that aren’t roots (gnus-article-hide-citation-in-followups). This isn’t very useful as an interactive command, but might be a handy function to stick have happen automatically (see section Customizing Articles).

All these “hiding” commands are toggles, but if you give a negative prefix to these commands, they will show what they have previously hidden. If you give a positive prefix, they will always hide.

Also see section Article Highlighting for further variables for citation customization.

See section Customizing Articles, for how to hide article elements automatically.

3.17.4 Article Washing

We call this “article washing” for a really good reason. Namely, the A key was taken, so we had to use the W key instead.

Washing is defined by us as “changing something from something to something else”, but normally results in something looking better. Cleaner, perhaps.

See section Customizing Articles, if you want to change how Gnus displays articles by default.

C-u g

This is not really washing, it’s sort of the opposite of washing. If you type this, you see the article exactly as it exists on disk or on the server.

g

Force redisplaying of the current article (gnus-summary-show-article). This is also not really washing. If you type this, you see the article without any previously applied interactive Washing functions but with all default treatments (see section Customizing Articles).

W l

Remove page breaks from the current article (gnus-summary-stop-page-breaking). See section Misc Article, for page delimiters.

W r

Do a Caesar rotate (rot13) on the article buffer (gnus-summary-caesar-message). Unreadable articles that tell you to read them with Caesar rotate or rot13. (Typically offensive jokes and such.)

It’s commonly called “rot13” because each letter is rotated 13 positions in the alphabet, e. g. ‘B’ (letter #2) -> ‘O’ (letter #15). It is sometimes referred to as “Caesar rotate” because Caesar is rumored to have employed this form of, uh, somewhat weak encryption.

W m

Morse decode the article buffer (gnus-summary-morse-message).

W t

t

Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer (gnus-summary-toggle-header).

W v

Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer permanently (gnus-summary-verbose-headers).

W o

Treat overstrike (gnus-article-treat-overstrike).

W d

Treat M****s*** sm*rtq**t*s according to gnus-article-dumbquotes-map (gnus-article-treat-dumbquotes). Note that this function guesses whether a character is a sm*rtq**t* or not, so it should only be used interactively.

Sm*rtq**t*s are M****s***’s unilateral extension to the character map in an attempt to provide more quoting characters. If you see something like \222 or \264 where you’re expecting some kind of apostrophe or quotation mark, then try this wash.

W Y f

Full deuglify of broken Outlook (Express) articles: Treat dumbquotes, unwrap lines, repair attribution and rearrange citation. (gnus-article-outlook-deuglify-article).

W Y u

Unwrap lines that appear to be wrapped citation lines. You can control what lines will be unwrapped by frobbing gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-min and gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-max, indicating the minimum and maximum length of an unwrapped citation line. (gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines).

W Y a

Repair a broken attribution line.
(gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution).

W Y c

Repair broken citations by rearranging the text. (gnus-article-outlook-rearrange-citation).

W w

Do word wrap (gnus-article-fill-cited-article).

You can give the command a numerical prefix to specify the width to use when filling.

W Q

Fill long lines (gnus-article-fill-long-lines).

W C

Capitalize the first word in each sentence (gnus-article-capitalize-sentences).

W c

Translate CRLF pairs (i. e., ‘^M’s on the end of the lines) into LF (this takes care of DOS line endings), and then translate any remaining CRs into LF (this takes care of Mac line endings) (gnus-article-remove-cr).

W q

Treat quoted-printable (gnus-article-de-quoted-unreadable). Quoted-Printable is one common MIME encoding employed when sending non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. It typically makes strings like ‘déjà vu’ look like ‘d=E9j=E0 vu’, which doesn’t look very readable to me. Note that this is usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a Content-Transfer-Encoding header that says that this encoding has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.

W 6

Treat base64 (gnus-article-de-base64-unreadable). Base64 is one common MIME encoding employed when sending non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. Note that this is usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a Content-Transfer-Encoding header that says that this encoding has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.

W Z

Treat HZ or HZP (gnus-article-decode-HZ). HZ (or HZP) is one common encoding employed when sending Chinese articles. It typically makes strings look like ‘~{<:Ky2;S{#,NpJ)l6HK!#~}’.

W u

Remove newlines from within URLs. Some mailers insert newlines into outgoing email messages to keep lines short. This reformatting can split long URLs onto multiple lines. Repair those URLs by removing the newlines (gnus-article-unsplit-urls).

W h

Treat HTML (gnus-article-wash-html). Note that this is usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a Content-Type header that says that the message is HTML.

If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for. If it is a number, the charset defined in gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist (see section Scrolling the Article) will be used.

The default is to use the function specified by mm-text-html-renderer (see (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual) to convert the HTML, but this is controlled by the gnus-article-wash-function variable. Pre-defined functions you can use include:

w3

Use Emacs/W3.

w3m

Use emacs-w3m.

w3m-standalone

Use w3m.

links

Use Links.

lynx

Use Lynx.

html2text

Use html2text—a simple HTML converter included with Gnus.

W b

Add clickable buttons to the article (gnus-article-add-buttons). See section Article Buttons.

W B

Add clickable buttons to the article headers (gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head).

W p

Verify a signed control message (gnus-article-verify-x-pgp-sig). Control messages such as newgroup and checkgroups are usually signed by the hierarchy maintainer. You need to add the PGP public key of the maintainer to your keyring to verify the message.(1)

W s

Verify a signed (PGP, PGP/MIME or S/MIME) message (gnus-summary-force-verify-and-decrypt). See section Security.

W a

Strip headers like the X-No-Archive header from the beginning of article bodies (gnus-article-strip-headers-in-body).

W E l

Remove all blank lines from the beginning of the article (gnus-article-strip-leading-blank-lines).

W E m

Replace all blank lines with empty lines and then all multiple empty lines with a single empty line. (gnus-article-strip-multiple-blank-lines).

W E t

Remove all blank lines at the end of the article (gnus-article-remove-trailing-blank-lines).

W E a

Do all the three commands above (gnus-article-strip-blank-lines).

W E A

Remove all blank lines (gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines).

W E s

Remove all white space from the beginning of all lines of the article body (gnus-article-strip-leading-space).

W E e

Remove all white space from the end of all lines of the article body (gnus-article-strip-trailing-space).

See section Customizing Articles, for how to wash articles automatically.

3.17.5 Article Header

These commands perform various transformations of article header.

W G u

Unfold folded header lines (gnus-article-treat-unfold-headers).

W G n

Fold the Newsgroups and Followup-To headers (gnus-article-treat-fold-newsgroups).

W G f

Fold all the message headers (gnus-article-treat-fold-headers).

W E w

Remove excessive whitespace from all headers (gnus-article-remove-leading-whitespace).

3.17.6 Article Buttons

People often include references to other stuff in articles, and it would be nice if Gnus could just fetch whatever it is that people talk about with the minimum of fuzz when you hit RET or use the middle mouse button on these references.

Gnus adds buttons to certain standard references by default: Well-formed URLs, mail addresses, Message-IDs, Info links, man pages and Emacs or Gnus related references. This is controlled by two variables, one that handles article bodies and one that handles article heads:

gnus-button-alist

This is an alist where each entry has this form:

(regexp button-par use-p function data-par)

regexp

All text that match this regular expression (case insensitive) will be considered an external reference. Here’s a typical regexp that matches embedded URLs: ‘<URL:\\([^\n\r>]*\\)>’. This can also be a variable containing a regexp, useful variables to use include gnus-button-url-regexp and gnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp.

button-par

Gnus has to know which parts of the matches is to be highlighted. This is a number that says what sub-expression of the regexp is to be highlighted. If you want it all highlighted, you use 0 here.

use-p

This form will be evaled, and if the result is non-nil, this is considered a match. This is useful if you want extra sifting to avoid false matches. Often variables named gnus-button-*-level are used here, See section Article button levels, but any other form may be used too.

function

This function will be called when you click on this button.

data-par

As with button-par, this is a sub-expression number, but this one says which part of the match is to be sent as data to function.

So the full entry for buttonizing URLs is then

("<URL:\\([^\n\r>]*\\)>" 0 t gnus-button-url 1)

gnus-header-button-alist

This is just like the other alist, except that it is applied to the article head only, and that each entry has an additional element that is used to say what headers to apply the buttonize coding to:

(header regexp button-par use-p function data-par)

header is a regular expression.

3.17.6.1 Related variables and functions

gnus-button-*-level

See section Article button levels.

gnus-button-url-regexp

A regular expression that matches embedded URLs. It is used in the default values of the variables above.

gnus-button-man-handler

The function to use for displaying man pages. It must take at least one argument with a string naming the man page.

gnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp

Regular expression that matches a message ID or a mail address.

gnus-button-prefer-mid-or-mail

This variable determines what to do when the button on a string as ‘foo123@bar.invalid’ is pushed. Strings like this can be either a message ID or a mail address. If it is one of the symbols mid or mail, Gnus will always assume that the string is a message ID or a mail address, respectively. If this variable is set to the symbol ask, always query the user what do do. If it is a function, this function will be called with the string as its only argument. The function must return mid, mail, invalid or ask. The default value is the function gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic.

gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic

Function that guesses whether its argument is a message ID or a mail address. Returns mid if it’s a message IDs, mail if it’s a mail address, ask if unsure and invalid if the string is invalid.

gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic-alist

An alist of (RATE . REGEXP) pairs used by the function gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic.

gnus-button-ctan-handler

The function to use for displaying CTAN links. It must take one argument, the string naming the URL.

gnus-ctan-url

Top directory of a CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) archive used by gnus-button-ctan-handler.

gnus-article-button-face

Face used on buttons.

gnus-article-mouse-face

Face used when the mouse cursor is over a button.

See section Customizing Articles, for how to buttonize articles automatically.

3.17.7 Article button levels

The higher the value of the variables gnus-button-*-level, the more buttons will appear. If the level is zero, no corresponding buttons are displayed. With the default value (which is 5) you should already see quite a lot of buttons. With higher levels, you will see more buttons, but you may also get more false positives. To avoid them, you can set the variables gnus-button-*-level local to specific groups (see section Group Parameters). Here’s an example for the variable gnus-parameters:

;; increase gnus-button-*-level in some groups:
(setq gnus-parameters
      '(("\\<\\(emacs\\|gnus\\)\\>" (gnus-button-emacs-level 10))
        ("\\<unix\\>"               (gnus-button-man-level 10))
        ("\\<tex\\>"                (gnus-button-tex-level 10))))

gnus-button-browse-level

Controls the display of references to message IDs, mail addresses and news URLs. Related variables and functions include gnus-button-url-regexp, browse-url, and browse-url-browser-function.

gnus-button-emacs-level

Controls the display of Emacs or Gnus references. Related functions are gnus-button-handle-custom, gnus-button-handle-describe-function, gnus-button-handle-describe-variable, gnus-button-handle-symbol, gnus-button-handle-describe-key, gnus-button-handle-apropos, gnus-button-handle-apropos-command, gnus-button-handle-apropos-variable, gnus-button-handle-apropos-documentation, and gnus-button-handle-library.

gnus-button-man-level

Controls the display of references to (Unix) man pages. See gnus-button-man-handler.

gnus-button-message-level

Controls the display of message IDs, mail addresses and news URLs. Related variables and functions include gnus-button-mid-or-mail-regexp, gnus-button-prefer-mid-or-mail, gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic, and gnus-button-mid-or-mail-heuristic-alist.

gnus-button-tex-level

Controls the display of references to TeX or LaTeX stuff, e.g. for CTAN URLs. See the variables gnus-ctan-url, gnus-button-ctan-handler, gnus-button-ctan-directory-regexp, and gnus-button-handle-ctan-bogus-regexp.

3.17.8 Article Date

The date is most likely generated in some obscure timezone you’ve never heard of, so it’s quite nice to be able to find out what the time was when the article was sent.

W T u

Display the date in UT (aka. GMT, aka ZULU) (gnus-article-date-ut).

W T i

Display the date in international format, aka. ISO 8601 (gnus-article-date-iso8601).

W T l

Display the date in the local timezone (gnus-article-date-local).

W T p

Display the date in a format that’s easily pronounceable in English (gnus-article-date-english).

W T s

Display the date using a user-defined format (gnus-article-date-user). The format is specified by the gnus-article-time-format variable, and is a string that’s passed to format-time-string. See the documentation of that variable for a list of possible format specs.

W T e

Say how much time has elapsed between the article was posted and now (gnus-article-date-lapsed). It looks something like:

X-Sent: 6 weeks, 4 days, 1 hour, 3 minutes, 8 seconds ago

The value of gnus-article-date-lapsed-new-header determines whether this header will just be added below the old Date one, or will replace it.

An advantage of using Gnus to read mail is that it converts simple bugs into wonderful absurdities.

If you want to have this line updated continually, you can put

(gnus-start-date-timer)

in your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file, or you can run it off of some hook. If you want to stop the timer, you can use the gnus-stop-date-timer command.

W T o

Display the original date (gnus-article-date-original). This can be useful if you normally use some other conversion function and are worried that it might be doing something totally wrong. Say, claiming that the article was posted in 1854. Although something like that is totally impossible. Don’t you trust me? *titter*

See section Customizing Articles, for how to display the date in your preferred format automatically.

3.17.9 Article Display

These commands add various frivolous display gimmicks to the article buffer in Emacs versions that support them.

X-Face headers are small black-and-white images supplied by the message headers (see section X-Face).

Face headers are small colored images supplied by the message headers (see section Face).

Smileys are those little ‘:-)’ symbols that people like to litter their messages with (see section Smileys).

Picons, on the other hand, reside on your own system, and Gnus will try to match the headers to what you have (see section Picons).

All these functions are toggles—if the elements already exist, they’ll be removed.

W D x

Display an X-Face in the From header. (gnus-article-display-x-face).

W D d

Display a Face in the From header. (gnus-article-display-face).

W D s

Display smileys (gnus-treat-smiley).

W D f

Piconify the From header (gnus-treat-from-picon).

W D m

Piconify all mail headers (i. e., Cc, To) (gnus-treat-mail-picon).

W D n

Piconify all news headers (i. e., Newsgroups and Followup-To) (gnus-treat-newsgroups-picon).

W D D

Remove all images from the article buffer (gnus-article-remove-images).

3.17.10 Article Signature

Each article is divided into two parts—the head and the body. The body can be divided into a signature part and a text part. The variable that says what is to be considered a signature is gnus-signature-separator. This is normally the standard ‘^-- $’ as mandated by son-of-RFC 1036. However, many people use non-standard signature separators, so this variable can also be a list of regular expressions to be tested, one by one. (Searches are done from the end of the body towards the beginning.) One likely value is:

(setq gnus-signature-separator
      '("^-- $"         ; The standard
        "^-- *$"        ; A common mangling
        "^-------*$"    ; Many people just use a looong
                        ; line of dashes.  Shame!
        "^ *--------*$" ; Double-shame!
        "^________*$"   ; Underscores are also popular
        "^========*$")) ; Pervert!

The more permissive you are, the more likely it is that you’ll get false positives.

gnus-signature-limit provides a limit to what is considered a signature when displaying articles.

1. If it is an integer, no signature may be longer (in characters) than that integer.
2. If it is a floating point number, no signature may be longer (in lines) than that number.
3. If it is a function, the function will be called without any parameters, and if it returns nil, there is no signature in the buffer.
4. If it is a string, it will be used as a regexp. If it matches, the text in question is not a signature.

This variable can also be a list where the elements may be of the types listed above. Here’s an example:

(setq gnus-signature-limit
      '(200.0 "^---*Forwarded article"))

This means that if there are more than 200 lines after the signature separator, or the text after the signature separator is matched by the regular expression ‘^---*Forwarded article’, then it isn’t a signature after all.

3.17.11 Article Miscellanea

A t

Translate the article from one language to another (gnus-article-babel).

3.18 MIME Commands

The following commands all understand the numerical prefix. For instance, 3 b means “view the third MIME part”.

b

K v

View the MIME part.

K o

Save the MIME part.

K c

Copy the MIME part.

K e

View the MIME part externally.

K i

View the MIME part internally.

K |

Pipe the MIME part to an external command.

The rest of these MIME commands do not use the numerical prefix in the same manner:

K b

Make all the MIME parts have buttons in front of them. This is mostly useful if you wish to save (or perform other actions) on inlined parts.

K m

Some multipart messages are transmitted with missing or faulty headers. This command will attempt to “repair” these messages so that they can be viewed in a more pleasant manner (gnus-summary-repair-multipart).

X m

Save all parts matching a MIME type to a directory (gnus-summary-save-parts). Understands the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).

M-t

Toggle the buttonized display of the article buffer (gnus-summary-toggle-display-buttonized).

W M w

Decode RFC 2047-encoded words in the article headers (gnus-article-decode-mime-words).

W M c

Decode encoded article bodies as well as charsets (gnus-article-decode-charset).

This command looks in the Content-Type header to determine the charset. If there is no such header in the article, you can give it a prefix, which will prompt for the charset to decode as. In regional groups where people post using some common encoding (but do not include MIME headers), you can set the charset group/topic parameter to the required charset (see section Group Parameters).

W M v

View all the MIME parts in the current article (gnus-mime-view-all-parts).

Relevant variables:

gnus-ignored-mime-types

This is a list of regexps. MIME types that match a regexp from this list will be completely ignored by Gnus. The default value is nil.

To have all Vcards be ignored, you’d say something like this:

(setq gnus-ignored-mime-types '("text/x-vcard"))

gnus-article-loose-mime

If non-nil, Gnus won’t require the ‘MIME-Version’ header before interpreting the message as a MIME message. This helps when reading messages from certain broken mail user agents. The default is nil.

gnus-article-emulate-mime

There are other, non-MIME encoding methods used. The most common is ‘uuencode’, but yEncode is also getting to be popular. If this variable is non-nil, Gnus will look in message bodies to see if it finds these encodings, and if so, it’ll run them through the Gnus MIME machinery. The default is t.

gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types

This is a list of regexps. MIME types that match a regexp from this list won’t have MIME buttons inserted unless they aren’t displayed or this variable is overridden by gnus-buttonized-mime-types. The default value is (".*/.*"). This variable is only used when gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing is nil.

gnus-buttonized-mime-types

This is a list of regexps. MIME types that match a regexp from this list will have MIME buttons inserted unless they aren’t displayed. This variable overrides gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types. The default value is nil. This variable is only used when gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing is nil.

To see e.g. security buttons but no other buttons, you could set this variable to ("multipart/signed") and leave gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types at the default value.

You could also add "multipart/alternative" to this list to display radio buttons that allow you to choose one of two media types those mails include. See also mm-discouraged-alternatives (see (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual).

gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing

If this is non-nil, then all MIME parts get buttons. The default value is nil.

gnus-article-mime-part-function

For each MIME part, this function will be called with the MIME handle as the parameter. The function is meant to be used to allow users to gather information from the article (e. g., add Vcard info to the bbdb database) or to do actions based on parts (e. g., automatically save all jpegs into some directory).

Here’s an example function the does the latter:

(defun my-save-all-jpeg-parts (handle) (when (equal (car (mm-handle-type handle)) "image/jpeg") (with-temp-buffer (insert (mm-get-part handle)) (write-region (point-min) (point-max) (read-file-name "Save jpeg to: "))))) (setq gnus-article-mime-part-function 'my-save-all-jpeg-parts)

gnus-mime-multipart-functions

Alist of MIME multipart types and functions to handle them.

gnus-mime-display-multipart-alternative-as-mixed

Display "multipart/alternative" parts as "multipart/mixed".

gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed

Display "multipart/related" parts as "multipart/mixed".

If displaying "text/html" is discouraged, see mm-discouraged-alternatives, images or other material inside a "multipart/related" part might be overlooked when this variable is nil. Display Customization: (emacs-mime)Display Customization section ‘Display Customization’ in Emacs-Mime Manual.

gnus-mime-display-multipart-as-mixed

Display "multipart" parts as "multipart/mixed". If t, it overrides nil values of gnus-mime-display-multipart-alternative-as-mixed and gnus-mime-display-multipart-related-as-mixed.

mm-file-name-rewrite-functions

List of functions used for rewriting file names of MIME parts. Each function takes a file name as input and returns a file name.

Ready-made functions include
mm-file-name-delete-whitespace, mm-file-name-trim-whitespace, mm-file-name-collapse-whitespace, and mm-file-name-replace-whitespace. The later uses the value of the variable mm-file-name-replace-whitespace to replace each whitespace character in a file name with that string; default value is "_" (a single underscore).

The standard functions capitalize, downcase, upcase, and upcase-initials may be useful, too.

Everybody knows that whitespace characters in file names are evil, except those who don’t know. If you receive lots of attachments from such unenlightened users, you can make live easier by adding

(setq mm-file-name-rewrite-functions '(mm-file-name-trim-whitespace mm-file-name-collapse-whitespace mm-file-name-replace-whitespace))

to your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file.

3.19 Charsets

People use different charsets, and we have MIME to let us know what charsets they use. Or rather, we wish we had. Many people use newsreaders and mailers that do not understand or use MIME, and just send out messages without saying what character sets they use. To help a bit with this, some local news hierarchies have policies that say what character set is the default. For instance, the ‘fj’ hierarchy uses iso-2022-jp.

This knowledge is encoded in the gnus-group-charset-alist variable, which is an alist of regexps (use the first item to match full group names) and default charsets to be used when reading these groups.

In addition, some people do use soi-disant MIME-aware agents that aren’t. These blithely mark messages as being in iso-8859-1 even if they really are in koi-8. To help here, the gnus-newsgroup-ignored-charsets variable can be used. The charsets that are listed here will be ignored. The variable can be set on a group-by-group basis using the group parameters (see section Group Parameters). The default value is (unknown-8bit x-unknown), which includes values some agents insist on having in there.

When posting, gnus-group-posting-charset-alist is used to determine which charsets should not be encoded using the MIME encodings. For instance, some hierarchies discourage using quoted-printable header encoding.

This variable is an alist of regexps and permitted unencoded charsets for posting. Each element of the alist has the form (test header body-list), where:

test

is either a regular expression matching the newsgroup header or a variable to query,

header

is the charset which may be left unencoded in the header (nil means encode all charsets),

body-list

is a list of charsets which may be encoded using 8bit content-transfer encoding in the body, or one of the special values nil (always encode using quoted-printable) or t (always use 8bit).

See (emacs-mime)Encoding Customization section ‘Encoding Customization’ in The Emacs MIME Manual, for additional variables that control which MIME charsets are used when sending messages.

Other charset tricks that may be useful, although not Gnus-specific:

If there are several MIME charsets that encode the same Emacs charset, you can choose what charset to use by saying the following:

(put-charset-property 'cyrillic-iso8859-5
                      'preferred-coding-system 'koi8-r)

This means that Russian will be encoded using koi8-r instead of the default iso-8859-5 MIME charset.

If you want to read messages in koi8-u, you can cheat and say

(define-coding-system-alias 'koi8-u 'koi8-r)

This will almost do the right thing.

And finally, to read charsets like windows-1251, you can say something like

(codepage-setup 1251)
(define-coding-system-alias 'windows-1251 'cp1251)

3.20 Article Commands

A P

Generate and print a PostScript image of the article buffer (gnus-summary-print-article). gnus-ps-print-hook will be run just before printing the buffer. An alternative way to print article is to use Muttprint (see section Saving Articles).

3.21 Summary Sorting

You can have the summary buffer sorted in various ways, even though I can’t really see why you’d want that.

C-c C-s C-n

Sort by article number (gnus-summary-sort-by-number).

C-c C-s C-a

Sort by author (gnus-summary-sort-by-author).

C-c C-s C-s

Sort by subject (gnus-summary-sort-by-subject).

C-c C-s C-d

Sort by date (gnus-summary-sort-by-date).

C-c C-s C-l

Sort by lines (gnus-summary-sort-by-lines).

C-c C-s C-c

Sort by article length (gnus-summary-sort-by-chars).

C-c C-s C-i

Sort by score (gnus-summary-sort-by-score).

C-c C-s C-r

Randomize (gnus-summary-sort-by-random).

C-c C-s C-o

Sort using the default sorting method (gnus-summary-sort-by-original).

These functions will work both when you use threading and when you don’t use threading. In the latter case, all summary lines will be sorted, line by line. In the former case, sorting will be done on a root-by-root basis, which might not be what you were looking for. To toggle whether to use threading, type T T (see section Thread Commands).

3.22 Finding the Parent

^

If you’d like to read the parent of the current article, and it is not displayed in the summary buffer, you might still be able to. That is, if the current group is fetched by NNTP, the parent hasn’t expired and the References in the current article are not mangled, you can just press ^ or A r (gnus-summary-refer-parent-article). If everything goes well, you’ll get the parent. If the parent is already displayed in the summary buffer, point will just move to this article.

If given a positive numerical prefix, fetch that many articles back into the ancestry. If given a negative numerical prefix, fetch just that ancestor. So if you say 3 ^, Gnus will fetch the parent, the grandparent and the grandgrandparent of the current article. If you say -3 ^, Gnus will only fetch the grandgrandparent of the current article.

A R (Summary)

Fetch all articles mentioned in the References header of the article (gnus-summary-refer-references).

A T (Summary)

Display the full thread where the current article appears (gnus-summary-refer-thread). This command has to fetch all the headers in the current group to work, so it usually takes a while. If you do it often, you may consider setting gnus-fetch-old-headers to invisible (see section Filling In Threads). This won’t have any visible effects normally, but it’ll make this command work a whole lot faster. Of course, it’ll make group entry somewhat slow.

The gnus-refer-thread-limit variable says how many old (i. e., articles before the first displayed in the current group) headers to fetch when doing this command. The default is 200. If t, all the available headers will be fetched. This variable can be overridden by giving the A T command a numerical prefix.

M-^ (Summary)

You can also ask Gnus for an arbitrary article, no matter what group it belongs to. M-^ (gnus-summary-refer-article) will ask you for a Message-ID, which is one of those long, hard-to-read thingies that look something like ‘<38o6up$6f2@hymir.ifi.uio.no>’. You have to get it all exactly right. No fuzzy searches, I’m afraid.

Gnus looks for the Message-ID in the headers that have already been fetched, but also tries all the select methods specified by gnus-refer-article-method if it is not found.

If the group you are reading is located on a back end that does not support fetching by Message-ID very well (like nnspool), you can set gnus-refer-article-method to an NNTP method. It would, perhaps, be best if the NNTP server you consult is the one updating the spool you are reading from, but that’s not really necessary.

It can also be a list of select methods, as well as the special symbol current, which means to use the current select method. If it is a list, Gnus will try all the methods in the list until it finds a match.

Here’s an example setting that will first try the current method, and then ask Google if that fails:

(setq gnus-refer-article-method
      '(current
        (nnweb "google" (nnweb-type google))))

Most of the mail back ends support fetching by Message-ID, but do not do a particularly excellent job at it. That is, nnmbox, nnbabyl, nnmaildir, nnml, are able to locate articles from any groups, while nnfolder, and nnimap are only able to locate articles that have been posted to the current group. (Anything else would be too time consuming.) nnmh does not support this at all.

3.23 Alternative Approaches

Different people like to read news using different methods. This being Gnus, we offer a small selection of minor modes for the summary buffers.

3.23.1 Pick and Read

Some newsreaders (like nn and, uhm, Netnews on VM/CMS) use a two-phased reading interface. The user first marks in a summary buffer the articles she wants to read. Then she starts reading the articles with just an article buffer displayed.

Gnus provides a summary buffer minor mode that allows this—gnus-pick-mode. This basically means that a few process mark commands become one-keystroke commands to allow easy marking, and it provides one additional command for switching to the summary buffer.

Here are the available keystrokes when using pick mode:

.

Pick the article or thread on the current line (gnus-pick-article-or-thread). If the variable gnus-thread-hide-subtree is true, then this key selects the entire thread when used at the first article of the thread. Otherwise, it selects just the article. If given a numerical prefix, go to that thread or article and pick it. (The line number is normally displayed at the beginning of the summary pick lines.)

SPACE

Scroll the summary buffer up one page (gnus-pick-next-page). If at the end of the buffer, start reading the picked articles.

u

Unpick the thread or article (gnus-pick-unmark-article-or-thread). If the variable gnus-thread-hide-subtree is true, then this key unpicks the thread if used at the first article of the thread. Otherwise it unpicks just the article. You can give this key a numerical prefix to unpick the thread or article at that line.

RET

Start reading the picked articles (gnus-pick-start-reading). If given a prefix, mark all unpicked articles as read first. If gnus-pick-display-summary is non-nil, the summary buffer will still be visible when you are reading.

All the normal summary mode commands are still available in the pick-mode, with the exception of u. However ! is available which is mapped to the same function gnus-summary-tick-article-forward.

If this sounds like a good idea to you, you could say:

(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'gnus-pick-mode)

gnus-pick-mode-hook is run in pick minor mode buffers.

If gnus-mark-unpicked-articles-as-read is non-nil, mark all unpicked articles as read. The default is nil.

The summary line format in pick mode is slightly different from the standard format. At the beginning of each line the line number is displayed. The pick mode line format is controlled by the gnus-summary-pick-line-format variable (see section Formatting Variables). It accepts the same format specs that gnus-summary-line-format does (see section Summary Buffer Lines).

3.23.2 Binary Groups

If you spend much time in binary groups, you may grow tired of hitting X u, n, RET all the time. M-x gnus-binary-mode is a minor mode for summary buffers that makes all ordinary Gnus article selection functions uudecode series of articles and display the result instead of just displaying the articles the normal way.

The only way, in fact, to see the actual articles is the g command, when you have turned on this mode (gnus-binary-show-article).

gnus-binary-mode-hook is called in binary minor mode buffers.

3.24 Tree Display

If you don’t like the normal Gnus summary display, you might try setting gnus-use-trees to t. This will create (by default) an additional tree buffer. You can execute all summary mode commands in the tree buffer.

There are a few variables to customize the tree display, of course:

gnus-tree-mode-hook

A hook called in all tree mode buffers.

gnus-tree-mode-line-format

A format string for the mode bar in the tree mode buffers (see section Mode Line Formatting). The default is ‘Gnus: %%b %S %Z’. For a list of valid specs, see section Summary Buffer Mode Line.

gnus-selected-tree-face

Face used for highlighting the selected article in the tree buffer. The default is modeline.

gnus-tree-line-format

A format string for the tree nodes. The name is a bit of a misnomer, though—it doesn’t define a line, but just the node. The default value is ‘%(%[%3,3n%]%)’, which displays the first three characters of the name of the poster. It is vital that all nodes are of the same length, so you must use ‘%4,4n’-like specifiers.

Valid specs are:

‘n’

The name of the poster.

‘f’

The From header.

‘N’

The number of the article.

‘[’

The opening bracket.

‘]’

The closing bracket.

‘s’

The subject.

See section Formatting Variables.

Variables related to the display are:

gnus-tree-brackets

This is used for differentiating between “real” articles and “sparse” articles. The format is

((real-open . real-close) (sparse-open . sparse-close) (dummy-open . dummy-close))

and the default is ((?[ . ?]) (?( . ?)) (?{ . ?}) (?< . ?>)).

gnus-tree-parent-child-edges

This is a list that contains the characters used for connecting parent nodes to their children. The default is (?- ?\\ ?|).

gnus-tree-minimize-window

If this variable is non-nil, Gnus will try to keep the tree buffer as small as possible to allow more room for the other Gnus windows. If this variable is a number, the tree buffer will never be higher than that number. The default is t. Note that if you have several windows displayed side-by-side in a frame and the tree buffer is one of these, minimizing the tree window will also resize all other windows displayed next to it.

You may also wish to add the following hook to keep the window minimized at all times:

(add-hook 'gnus-configure-windows-hook 'gnus-tree-perhaps-minimize)

gnus-generate-tree-function

The function that actually generates the thread tree. Two predefined functions are available: gnus-generate-horizontal-tree and gnus-generate-vertical-tree (which is the default).

Here’s an example from a horizontal tree buffer:

{***}-(***)-[odd]-[Gun]
     |      \[Jan]
     |      \[odd]-[Eri]
     |      \(***)-[Eri]
     |            \[odd]-[Paa]
     \[Bjo]
     \[Gun]
     \[Gun]-[Jor]

Here’s the same thread displayed in a vertical tree buffer:

{***}
  |--------------------------\-----\-----\
(***)                         [Bjo] [Gun] [Gun]
  |--\-----\-----\                          |
[odd] [Jan] [odd] (***)                   [Jor]
  |           |     |--\
[Gun]       [Eri] [Eri] [odd]
                          |
                        [Paa]

If you’re using horizontal trees, it might be nice to display the trees side-by-side with the summary buffer. You could add something like the following to your ‘~/.gnus.el’ file:

(setq gnus-use-trees t
      gnus-generate-tree-function 'gnus-generate-horizontal-tree
      gnus-tree-minimize-window nil)
(gnus-add-configuration
 '(article
   (vertical 1.0
             (horizontal 0.25
                         (summary 0.75 point)
                         (tree 1.0))
             (article 1.0))))

See section Window Layout.

3.25 Mail Group Commands

Some commands only make sense in mail groups. If these commands are invalid in the current group, they will raise a hell and let you know.

All these commands (except the expiry and edit commands) use the process/prefix convention (see section Process/Prefix).

B e

Run all expirable articles in the current group through the expiry process (gnus-summary-expire-articles). That is, delete all expirable articles in the group that have been around for a while. (see section Expiring Mail).

B C-M-e

Delete all the expirable articles in the group (gnus-summary-expire-articles-now). This means that all articles eligible for expiry in the current group will disappear forever into that big ‘/dev/null’ in the sky.

B DEL

Delete the mail article. This is “delete” as in “delete it from your disk forever and ever, never to return again.” Use with caution. (gnus-summary-delete-article).

B m

Move the article from one mail group to another (gnus-summary-move-article). Marks will be preserved if gnus-preserve-marks is non-nil (which is the default).

B c

Copy the article from one group (mail group or not) to a mail group (gnus-summary-copy-article). Marks will be preserved if gnus-preserve-marks is non-nil (which is the default).

B B

Crosspost the current article to some other group (gnus-summary-crosspost-article). This will create a new copy of the article in the other group, and the Xref headers of the article will be properly updated.

B i

Import an arbitrary file into the current mail newsgroup (gnus-summary-import-article). You will be prompted for a file name, a From header and a Subject header.

B I

Create an empty article in the current mail newsgroups (gnus-summary-create-article). You will be prompted for a From header and a Subject header.

B r

Respool the mail article (gnus-summary-respool-article). gnus-summary-respool-default-method will be used as the default select method when respooling. This variable is nil by default, which means that the current group select method will be used instead. Marks will be preserved if gnus-preserve-marks is non-nil (which is the default).

B w

e

Edit the current article (gnus-summary-edit-article). To finish editing and make the changes permanent, type C-c C-c (gnus-summary-edit-article-done). If you give a prefix to the C-c C-c command, Gnus won’t re-highlight the article.

B q

If you want to re-spool an article, you might be curious as to what group the article will end up in before you do the re-spooling. This command will tell you (gnus-summary-respool-query).

B t

Similarly, this command will display all fancy splitting patterns used when respooling, if any (gnus-summary-respool-trace).

B p

Some people have a tendency to send you “courtesy” copies when they follow up to articles you have posted. These usually have a Newsgroups header in them, but not always. This command (gnus-summary-article-posted-p) will try to fetch the current article from your news server (or rather, from gnus-refer-article-method or gnus-select-method) and will report back whether it found the article or not. Even if it says that it didn’t find the article, it may have been posted anyway—mail propagation is much faster than news propagation, and the news copy may just not have arrived yet.

K E

Encrypt the body of an article (gnus-article-encrypt-body). The body is encrypted with the encryption protocol specified by the variable gnus-article-encrypt-protocol.

If you move (or copy) articles regularly, you might wish to have Gnus suggest where to put the articles. gnus-move-split-methods is a variable that uses the same syntax as gnus-split-methods (see section Saving Articles). You may customize that variable to create suggestions you find reasonable. (Note that gnus-move-split-methods uses group names where gnus-split-methods uses file names.)

(setq gnus-move-split-methods
      '(("^From:.*Lars Magne" "nnml:junk")
        ("^Subject:.*gnus" "nnfolder:important")
        (".*" "nnml:misc")))

3.26 Various Summary Stuff

gnus-summary-display-while-building

If non-nil, show and update the summary buffer as it’s being built. If t, update the buffer after every line is inserted. If the value is an integer, n, update the display every n lines. The default is nil.

gnus-summary-display-arrow

If non-nil, display an arrow in the fringe to indicate the current article.

gnus-summary-mode-hook

This hook is called when creating a summary mode buffer.

gnus-summary-generate-hook

This is called as the last thing before doing the threading and the generation of the summary buffer. It’s quite convenient for customizing the threading variables based on what data the newsgroup has. This hook is called from the summary buffer after most summary buffer variables have been set.

gnus-summary-prepare-hook

It is called after the summary buffer has been generated. You might use it to, for instance, highlight lines or modify the look of the buffer in some other ungodly manner. I don’t care.

gnus-summary-prepared-hook

A hook called as the very last thing after the summary buffer has been generated.

gnus-summary-ignore-duplicates

When Gnus discovers two articles that have the same Message-ID, it has to do something drastic. No articles are allowed to have the same Message-ID, but this may happen when reading mail from some sources. Gnus allows you to customize what happens with this variable. If it is nil (which is the default), Gnus will rename the Message-ID (for display purposes only) and display the article as any other article. If this variable is t, it won’t display the article—it’ll be as if it never existed.

gnus-alter-articles-to-read-function

This function, which takes two parameters (the group name and the list of articles to be selected), is called to allow the user to alter the list of articles to be selected.

For instance, the following function adds the list of cached articles to the list in one particular group:

(defun my-add-cached-articles (group articles) (if (string= group "some.group") (append gnus-newsgroup-cached articles) articles))

gnus-newsgroup-variables

A list of newsgroup (summary buffer) local variables, or cons of variables and their default expressions to be evalled (when the default values are not nil), that should be made global while the summary buffer is active.

Note: The default expressions will be evaluated (using function eval) before assignment to the local variable rather than just assigned to it. If the default expression is the symbol global, that symbol will not be evaluated but the global value of the local variable will be used instead.

These variables can be used to set variables in the group parameters while still allowing them to affect operations done in other buffers. For example:

(setq gnus-newsgroup-variables '(message-use-followup-to (gnus-visible-headers . "^From:\\|^Newsgroups:\\|^Subject:\\|^Date:\\|^To:")))

Also see section Group Parameters.

3.26.1 Summary Group Information

H f

Try to fetch the FAQ (list of frequently asked questions) for the current group (gnus-summary-fetch-faq). Gnus will try to get the FAQ from gnus-group-faq-directory, which is usually a directory on a remote machine. This variable can also be a list of directories. In that case, giving a prefix to this command will allow you to choose between the various sites. ange-ftp or efs will probably be used for fetching the file.

H d

Give a brief description of the current group (gnus-summary-describe-group). If given a prefix, force rereading the description from the server.

H h

Give an extremely brief description of the most important summary keystrokes (gnus-summary-describe-briefly).

H i

Go to the Gnus info node (gnus-info-find-node).

3.26.2 Searching for Articles

M-s

Search through all subsequent (raw) articles for a regexp (gnus-summary-search-article-forward).

M-r

Search through all previous (raw) articles for a regexp (gnus-summary-search-article-backward).

&

This command will prompt you for a header, a regular expression to match on this field, and a command to be executed if the match is made (gnus-summary-execute-command). If the header is an empty string, the match is done on the entire article. If given a prefix, search backward instead.

For instance, & RET some.*string RET # will put the process mark on all articles that have heads or bodies that match ‘some.*string’.

M-&

Perform any operation on all articles that have been marked with the process mark (gnus-summary-universal-argument).

3.26.3 Summary Generation Commands

Y g

Regenerate the current summary buffer (gnus-summary-prepare).

Y c

Pull all cached articles (for the current group) into the summary buffer (gnus-summary-insert-cached-articles).

Y d

Pull all dormant articles (for the current group) into the summary buffer (gnus-summary-insert-dormant-articles).