New colors for undownloaded articles: tweak behavior a bit?

New colors for undownloaded articles: tweak behavior a bit?

[Kai Grossjohann]

By default, the agent is enabled.  That's good, even if I don't really
use it when Emacs is running on the same host as the imap server.  So
I didn't turn it off.

But now it turns out that I can't tell the difference between normal
articles and ticked articles anymore from the color.

I wonder if it would make sense to lower the priority of the
"downloaded/undownloaded" distinction a bit in favor of showing other
attributes, if Gnus is plugged?  I appreciate that the
downloaded/undownloaded distinction is important when one is offline
(can't read the undownloaded ones), but is it important when one is
online?

Hm.  It is important for those who quickly want to see which articles
to mark for downloading.  Hm.  But is it possible to do it another
way?

Kai

Re: New colors for undownloaded articles: tweak behavior a bit?

[Kevin Greiner]

Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:

> By default, the agent is enabled.  That's good, even if I don't really
> use it when Emacs is running on the same host as the imap server.  So
> I didn't turn it off.
>
> But now it turns out that I can't tell the difference between normal
> articles and ticked articles anymore from the color.
>
> I wonder if it would make sense to lower the priority of the
> "downloaded/undownloaded" distinction a bit in favor of showing other
> attributes, if Gnus is plugged?  I appreciate that the
> downloaded/undownloaded distinction is important when one is offline
> (can't read the undownloaded ones), but is it important when one is
> online?
>
> Hm.  It is important for those who quickly want to see which articles
> to mark for downloading.  Hm.  But is it possible to do it another
> way?


Exactly.  The color scheme is a waste once you're offline as you can't
fetch the undownloaded articles.  The entire point is to let online
users know what content will be available should they go offline.

As for the precidence, I tried a number of precidence settings and
this was the only one that made sense.

What would be nice is if we could rewrite the gnus-summary-hightlight
form to select face attributes rather than faces.  That way multiple
attributes would combine to select a distinct face.

Now that the agent is being used for online caching, the color scheme
is probably too intrusive (at least for those users).  That's why you
can disable it.  There is more information in the manual under Agent
Visuals should you be interested.

Kevin

Re: New colors for undownloaded articles: tweak behavior a bit?

[Wes Hardaker]

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>>>>> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 20:29:24 -0600, Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> said:

Kevin> What would be nice is if we could rewrite the
Kevin> gnus-summary-hightlight form to select face attributes rather
Kevin> than faces.  That way multiple attributes would combine to
Kevin> select a distinct face.

My gnus-highlight routine is close to this now.  It lets you do
highlighting of different parts of the summary buffer instead of the
whole line.  I've wanted to make it "merge" faces together, but it
doesn't (yet)...

Snapshot follows:


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Note that the yellow bars on the left are my unlearned spam articles
(they need to be trained), gray means "ham", and the yellow "Lars"
lines are because he's just super cool (and served as a good example
for the day).  But the important part, is that the whole line isn't
affected.  Just parts of it.  The gnus-highlight expressions lay over
the top of the gnus-summary-hightlight and thus serve as an overlay.
you could markk just parts of the summary line as undownloaded, etc.


-- 
"In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap,
 and much more difficult to find."  -- Terry Pratchett

Re: New colors for undownloaded articles: tweak behavior a bit?

[Kevin Greiner]

Wes Hardaker <wes@hardakers.net> writes:

>>>>>> On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 20:29:24 -0600, Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> said:
>
> Kevin> What would be nice is if we could rewrite the
> Kevin> gnus-summary-hightlight form to select face attributes rather
> Kevin> than faces.  That way multiple attributes would combine to
> Kevin> select a distinct face.
>
> My gnus-highlight routine is close to this now.  It lets you do
> highlighting of different parts of the summary buffer instead of the
> whole line.  I've wanted to make it "merge" faces together, but it
> doesn't (yet)...
>
> Snapshot follows:
>
>
>
> Note that the yellow bars on the left are my unlearned spam articles
> (they need to be trained), gray means "ham", and the yellow "Lars"
> lines are because he's just super cool (and served as a good example
> for the day).  But the important part, is that the whole line isn't
> affected.  Just parts of it.  The gnus-highlight expressions lay over
> the top of the gnus-summary-hightlight and thus serve as an overlay.
> you could markk just parts of the summary line as undownloaded, etc.

That's certainly a possibility and one that I'd be willing to help
integrate.  I'm not sure whether this could be introduced as a "bug
fix".  We might have to wait until new features can be added.

Kevin

Re: New colors for undownloaded articles: tweak behavior a bit?

[Wes Hardaker]

>>>>> On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:26:40 -0600, Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> said:

Kevin> That's certainly a possibility and one that I'd be willing to help
Kevin> integrate.  I'm not sure whether this could be introduced as a "bug
Kevin> fix".  We might have to wait until new features can be added.

My highlighting package isn't in the distribution yet for the same reasons...

-- 
"In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap,
 and much more difficult to find."  -- Terry Pratchett

Re: New colors for undownloaded articles: tweak behavior a bit?

[Kai Grossjohann]

Kevin Greiner <kgreiner@xpediantsolutions.com> writes:

> Exactly.  The color scheme is a waste once you're offline as you can't
> fetch the undownloaded articles.  The entire point is to let online
> users know what content will be available should they go offline.

I see.  I've now read the Agent Visuals stuff, too, and it even has a
paragraph about me ;-)  (As a person using the agent just as a header
cache at the moment.)

I noticed that my ticked articles, while technically "undownloaded",
have actually been downloaded (they are in the cache because of (setq
gnus-use-cache t)).  So I wonder if it is possible to consider cached
articles as downloaded for the purpose of highlighting.

But it's obvious that it doesn't make sense to do this just for a
single user, so it would be good to have some discussion about it.

Thanks a lot for the very gentle manner of telling me to rtfm.  I have
now (for testing) tweaked that group parameter and now the summary
buffer looks really cool ;-)

Kai
-- 
Why should I read the fucking manual?  I know how to fuck!