Re: PATCH: Skip over ticked articles in summary buffer

[John Griffith <griffith@sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de>]

After some discussion with Aharon, I would like to make a couple of
suggestions.

First, I like Aharon's idea that I should be able to enter a group and
be positioned on an article but without actually opening it.  This is
somewhat possible with the variable `gnus-auto-select-first'.  If its
value is `nil' then I enter the group with the cursor over the very
first article in the buffer, `best' positions the cursor on the
article with the highest score _and_ opens it.  Anything else
positions the cursor on the first unread article _and_ opens it.
Aharon's patch (`position') positions the cursor on the first unread
article but does not open it.  All of this leads me to the conclusion
that this poor variable has too many things to do :-)

What if instead, there were two variables - 1 to determine which
article the cursor would be positioned on (`nil' = first in buffer,
`best' = article with the highest score, anything else = the first
unread article) and 2 to determine independently whether that article
should be opened/shown/selected.

Second, this only controls the initial entry into the group.  The `.'
key (in the summary buffer) selects the next unread article, ','
selects the next best article, `N' selects the very next article.
These all move the cursor _and_ open the article.  I would like a way
to move to the next article _without_ opening it.  Sometimes I just
want to see what article is next but I don't want to open it because I
might decide simply from the subject that I don not want to read it
and therefore (if I'm using scoring) I do not want it to get
registered as an article that I chose to read.  Plus if its large and
far away I don't want to suck it across the net.  One way to do this
would be to have a variable setting so that (for instance) `.' would
only position the cursor and I would have to use `space' to open it.
Another possibility would be to toggle this behavior with `C-u .'.  So
in some groups I might want to never open articles by default but in
others I might want the opposite behavior and a `C-u' prefix would
allow me to override the current behavior.