Suggestion: gnus-goto-article

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

I realized that all that noise I made about wanting a "fourth" article
state could be much better addressed (for me at least) with a
completely different approach that I think might prove quite useful
for others too.

The reason I wanted a fourth state was that I wanted to be able to
mark articles that I needed to do something about in the medium-term
future, but that really weren't urgent, a sort of a "to-do" list.

What I realized was that this could be better handled with a more
general approach.  What I'd like is a function

  (gnus-goto-article gnurl)

This would be an (interactive) function that could be called from
anywhere in emacs that would jump immediately to the appropriate
summary buffer (launching gnus if needed) to display the article
specified by gnurl.  Then I'd like to have another function

  (gnus-follow-gnurl-at-point)

that would call gnus-goto-article on the gnurl underneath the cursor
and one other related function:

  (gnus-summary-copy-gnurl)

Which would capture a gnurl for the article the cursor was on that you
could yank elsewhere.

This would let you create plain text documents like (format for a
gnurl not to be taken seriously)

  * Make sure to check on the status of those rampaging elephants
    <gnus://nnml+rlb:inbox/3433> <gnus://nnml+rlb:firedrill/231>.

  * See if the ding group thinks your proposal stinks
    <gnus://nnml+rlb:ding-gnus/1032>.

Or perhaps the gnurl should be a message ID or news server article ID?
I'm not familiar enough with the mail/news implementations to know
what's workable, though a unique ID would mean that even if you moved
the article, gnus-goto-article would still be able to track it down.

Thoughts?

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930