Re: Position of point in reply-with-original

[Antoine Levitt <antoine.levitt@gmail.com>]

03/02/11 17:24, Eric Abrahamsen
> On Thu, Feb 03 2011, Antoine Levitt wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> This might be a very dumb question but I didn't find any posts or doc to
>> that effect. When I reply-with-original, the point is in weird
>> places. For instance,
>>
>> *headers*
>> --text follows this line--
>> On XX, YY wrote
>> !> stuff
>>
>> with point at !. Why isn't it either above or below by default, and why
>> isn't there a variable to change this behaviour? I'd expect this issue
>> to have been raised by now: how do people cope with this?
>
> I started a thread on this issue either here or in emacs.gnus.user
> pretty recently, but now can't find it… Basically the variable
> message-citation-line-function dictates what kind of citation line is
> inserted, and where point ends up afterwards. All the built-in defaults
> for that variable do what you've seen: place point after the citation
> line. If you want open space *above* the citation line, and start point
> at the top of the buffer, you'll have to write a custom function. Check
> out section 3.6 of the info manual for Message (how do you all make
> nifty clickable links to Info nodes, by the way?).
>
> Briefly, the "interleaved" quotation style expects that you'd begin
> composing your reply somewhere down in the midst of the quoted text.
> "Top posting" style expects you to start typing a distinct reply at the
> top of the message body. Gnus, having evolved for newsreading, assumes
> you don't want to top-post.
>
> Eric

I see. Wikipedia has an amazingly long article about it at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style

There's message-cite-reply-above that does the trick, but is incredibly
condescending by

- insulting you for wanting the option in the first place in the
  docstring
- ignoring the setting in news posting
- asking you if you're really really sure when you post

It seems it's pretty standard use in mail, and almost all "modern"
clients (webmails, thunderbird, outlook and such) have this as
default. I'm not trying to start a flamewar as to which one is better,
but we should give the users the option.

A good long-term option would be to have a message-citation-style that
would include 'top-posting, 'interleaved-posting, 'bottom-posting, where
interleaved-posting would be what's currently in place, and top / bottom
would position point at the beginning/end of the buffer, creating the
necessary newlines. Users would then set that in gnus-posting-style, in
order to (for instance) top-post for mail and interleave for news. What
do people think?