Re: fancy splitting interactively

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Right, that's pretty much what I meant -- if I want to send an email as
>> Eric Abrahamsen, International Man of Mystery, complete with custom
>> headers and signature, I don't want to have to navigate to the "Man of
>> Mystery" group and compose from there. There probably isn't such a
>> group, and even if there were, that's not really what I *mean*.
>
> Yeah, that makes sense.
>
>> We'd have to figure out how these identities would interact with
>> composing from a group, but that could actually be interesting. A
>> group's posting styles could say "use identity B when composing from
>> this group", for example.
>
> ...but this is how Gnus already works now.  Or am I missing something?
>
>> In short, in several cases I have gone through multiple groups and set
>> the same headers on all those groups' posting styles. It would make more
>> sense to me to specify that all these groups use the same identity.
>
> Oh, I think you're just missing the fact that this is Gnus, so you don't
> need to be mucking about in the properties of individual groups and can
> just use elisp.  :)
>
> (setq gnus-posting-styles
>       '(("."
>          (address "eagle@eyrie.org")
>          (name "Russ Allbery")
>          (organization "The Eyrie")
>          (signature-file "~/docs/sigs/eyrie")
>          (eval
>           (setq gnus-message-archive-group (rra-archive-group "mail"))))
>
>         ((or (string-match "^comp\\.lang\\.perl" gnus-newsgroup-name)
>              (string-match "^nnml:project\\.perl" gnus-newsgroup-name))
>          (address "rra@cpan.org")
>          (signature-file "~/docs/sigs/perl"))
>
>         ((and (string= "news.software.nntp" gnus-newsgroup-name)
>               (message-news-p))
>          (signature-file "~/docs/sigs/help-newsgroup"))
>
>         ((string= "nnml:project.inn" gnus-newsgroup-name)
>          (signature-file "~/docs/sigs/help-list"))))
>
> and so forth.  All matching settings are applied in order, so put more
> specific entries later.

Right, but again this is group-centric, rather than identity-centric,
which conceptually seems like the proper approach, to me.

> https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Posting-Styles.html
>
> But you're right that mine is based on my current group, so I have to
> navigate to the appropriate group to use a particular style.  Although
> note the documentation of gnus-posting-styles: you can run arbitrary elisp
> to figure out what style to use, among other things.  So if you can figure
> out some other piece of information Gnus has available to select on, you
> can already use that to determine the posting style.
>
> But I don't think there's an easy way to give you something like Gmail's
> drop-down list of identities to pick from right now.

But what you say is true -- we're actually probably very close to having
it, and I don't think it would take a lot of code to get from here to
there. Just a little thought about how to meld identities and posting
styles...