Map of Emacs Users

Add yourself to the Map of Emacs Users around the world… and leave a note with the emacsen version(s) you use, just for the fun of it! You can also take a look at Emacs google trends (or the Emacs vs. that other editor one), the EmacsUserLocations page or this Emacs Screenshots flickr group.

Gmail envy

Although Gnus is my primary mail reader, there’s lots of things i like about Gmail (actually, Gmail is my primary inbox: Gnus reads mail from there). For instance, a little feature i love in Gmail is those markers that tell you whether you’re one of the direct recipients of a mail. When seeing a long list of mails in a mail list, i can quickly identify those with me explicitly in the To: or Cc: headers: chances are i’m slightly more interested in them.

In Gnus, one can customize the information shown in the message list by tweaking the variable gnus-summary-line-format. If you press C-h v gnus-summary-line-format to see all the formatting options, you’ll see there’s a lot of information to be shown, but not the one we want. But, as is always the case, we have a hook to extend the format to our hearts content: the %uX directive, where X is any letter you want. When Gnus sees that directive, it calls gnus-user-format-function-X, a function you must write returning a string that gets inserted in the summary line. So here we go: first i define a string with a regexp of my email addresses:

(defvar *jao-mails* 
        "jao@foo\\.org\\|jao@baz\\.com\\|jao@grogle\\.com")

and then i function which returns a “»” if i’m the only recipient of the message, or a “~” if i’m in the To:, Cc: or BCc: headers among others:

(defun gnus-user-format-function-j (headers)
  (let ((to (gnus-extra-header 'To headers)))
    (if (string-match *jao-mails* to)
        (if (string-match "," to) "~" "»")
        (if (or (string-match *jao-mails* 
                              (gnus-extra-header 'Cc headers))
                (string-match *jao-mails* 
                              (gnus-extra-header 'BCc headers)))
            "~"
            " "))))

Then all that is left is using it in my gnus-summary-line-format:

(setq
 gnus-summary-line-format
 "%U%R %~(pad-right 2)t%* %uj %B%~(max-right 20)~(pad-right 20)n %s\n")

Notice the %uj doing the trick here. I’m sure you’ll come up with other uses to this extension mechanism, which, by the way, is also available for gnus-group-line-format, the variable governing how lines in the *Group* buffer are displayed.