displaying initial words in a summary line (like gmail)

displaying initial words in a summary line (like gmail)

[James Leifer]

The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
that has been posted to gnu.emacs.gnus as well.

Hello,

I was reading the doc for gnus-summary-line-format, but couldn't find
an answer to my question.

When visually scanning the summary buffer I would find it useful to
see the first couple of words of each message.  Those who use Google
gmail might have noticed that this makes it far faster to identify to
the missed spams in the inbox and the missed hams in the spambox.

Any ideas?

While I'm asking, is there any way to get proportional fonts for the
summary buffer (but maintain the tabular alignment) so I can easily
see more data?

Regards,
-James

Re: displaying initial words in a summary line (like gmail)

[Miles Bader]

James Leifer <James.Leifer@inria.fr> writes:
> While I'm asking, is there any way to get proportional fonts for the
> summary buffer (but maintain the tabular alignment) so I can easily
> see more data?

There are a number of `gnus-summary-...' faces that gnus uses for
summary displays; perhaps you could customize them all and add `:inherit
variable-pitch'.  It might be convenient if gnus would have all its
summary faces :inherit from a common `gnus-summary' face so that this
sort of customization could be done more easily...  [But I'm not sure
that face-inheritance is supported in all the systems gnus wants to
support...]

Doing the above doesn't really preserve "tabular alignment" though --
for instance, the first few columns in a summary line are the mark
characters, and if those are variable-pitch, the rest of the summary
lines can be out of alignment; if gnus would somehow use a special face
(which could force fixed-pitch) for those first few columns it would
help, but ... that's a bigger change.

-Miles
-- 
Run away!  Run away!

Re: displaying initial words in a summary line (like gmail)

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, James.Leifer@inria.fr wrote:

> When visually scanning the summary buffer I would find it useful to
> see the first couple of words of each message.  Those who use Google
> gmail might have noticed that this makes it far faster to identify to
> the missed spams in the inbox and the missed hams in the spambox.
> 
> Any ideas?

Here's something that may work.  The main problem is that it takes
time to read the entire message, since Gnus doesn't do partial
retrievals, so for large messages it's slow.  This is especially bad
with nnimap, because you have to use a network connection to retrieve
the message.

This function grabs the first 10 characters in the article body.  You
may want to extract words in some other way, it's up to you.  Also if
there aren't 10 characters available you may get an error - a regular
expression is probably the best way to work this.

(defun gnus-user-format-function-B (headers)
  (if (and headers gnus-newsgroup-name)
      (let* ((article (spam-fetch-field-fast -4332 'number headers))) ; -4332 is a fake article number
	(with-temp-buffer
	  (gnus-request-article-this-buffer
	   article
	   gnus-newsgroup-name)
	  (article-goto-body)
	  (buffer-substring-no-properties (point) (+ (point) 10))))
	"--invalid headers or group name--"))

If you use this function or something like it, just put %uB in your
summary format string.

Ted