Re: Shorter/customized group names?

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:
> on Wed May 27 2009, David Engster <deng-AT-randomsample.de> wrote:
>> Just a guess, but using %G instead of %g in gnus-group-line-format will
>> probably do what you want.
>
> Well, thanks; it's definitely a start.  I'd like to do better,
> though. I guess I can use a ~(...) clause and hand-code it, but I
> think there are some things I wouldn't be able to do very easily that
> way.  For example, I'm currently seeing:
>
>        233 | gmane.comp.lib.boost.announce
>       3251 | gmane.comp.lib.boost.asio.user

[...]

> which could be made as simple as:
>
>        233 | gmane.comp.lib.boost.announce
>       3251 |  .boost.asio.user

[...]

Well, there's still the possibility to use collapsed group names (see %c
in gnus-group-line-format), but I never used that because then *all*
groups are collapsed; I like your idea much better. You can do that by
using a user-defined function. Put the following into your .gnus:

(defvar DE-format-previous-regexp nil)
(defvar DE-format-collapse-level 2)

(defun gnus-user-format-function-A (arg)
  (let ((group gnus-tmp-qualified-group))
    (if (eq (car gnus-tmp-method) 'nntp)
	(if (and DE-format-previous-regexp
		 (string-match DE-format-previous-regexp group))
	    (concat " ." (match-string 1 group))
	  (setq DE-format-previous-regexp 
		(if (string-match (format "\\(\\([a-z]+\\.\\)\\{%d\\}\\).+"
					  DE-format-collapse-level)
				  group)
		    (concat (regexp-quote (match-string 1 group))
			    "\\(.+\\)")
		  nil))
	  group)
      (setq DE-format-previous-regexp nil)
      group)))


Now just use %uA instead of %G in gnus-group-line-format. You probably
want to use a collapse level of "3" for your example above. Beware that
this may be buggy, but it works for me so far.

Regards,
David