gnus: Finding the Parent
3.23 Finding the Parent
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‘^’
If you’d like to read the parent of the current article, and it is
not displayed in the summary buffer, you might still be able to.
That is, if the current group is fetched by NNTP, the parent hasn’t
expired and the ‘References’ in the current article are not
mangled, you can just press ‘^’ or ‘A r’
(‘gnus-summary-refer-parent-article’). If everything goes well,
you’ll get the parent. If the parent is already displayed in the
summary buffer, point will just move to this article.
If given a positive numerical prefix, fetch that many articles back
into the ancestry. If given a negative numerical prefix, fetch
just that ancestor. So if you say ‘3 ^’, Gnus will fetch the
parent, the grandparent and the great-grandparent of the current
article. If you say ‘-3 ^’, Gnus will only fetch the
great-grandparent of the current article.
‘A R (Summary)’
Fetch all articles mentioned in the ‘References’ header of the
article (‘gnus-summary-refer-references’).
‘A T (Summary)’
Display the full thread where the current article appears
(‘gnus-summary-refer-thread’). This command has to fetch all the
headers in the current group to work, so it usually takes a while.
If you do it often, you may consider setting
‘gnus-fetch-old-headers’ to ‘invisible’ (
Filling In
Threads). This won’t have any visible effects normally, but
it’ll make this command work a whole lot faster. Of course, it’ll
make group entry somewhat slow.
The ‘gnus-refer-thread-limit’ variable says how many old (i.e.,
articles before the first displayed in the current group) headers
to fetch when doing this command. The default is 200. If ‘t’, all
the available headers will be fetched. This variable can be
overridden by giving the ‘A T’ command a numerical prefix.
‘M-^ (Summary)’
You can also ask Gnus for an arbitrary article, no matter what
group it belongs to. ‘M-^’ (‘gnus-summary-refer-article’) will ask
you for a ‘Message-ID’, which is one of those long, hard-to-read
thingies that look something like ‘<38o6up$6f2@hymir.ifi.uio.no>’.
You have to get it all exactly right. No fuzzy searches, I’m
afraid.
Gnus looks for the ‘Message-ID’ in the headers that have already
been fetched, but also tries all the select methods specified by
‘gnus-refer-article-method’ if it is not found.
If the group you are reading is located on a back end that does not
support fetching by ‘Message-ID’ very well (like ‘nnspool’), you can set
‘gnus-refer-article-method’ to an NNTP method. It would, perhaps, be
best if the NNTP server you consult is the one updating the spool you
are reading from, but that’s not really necessary.
It can also be a list of select methods, as well as the special
symbol ‘current’, which means to use the current select method. If it
is a list, Gnus will try all the methods in the list until it finds a
match.
Here’s an example setting that will first try the current method, and
then ask Google if that fails:
(setq gnus-refer-article-method
'(current
(nnweb "google" (nnweb-type google))))
Most of the mail back ends support fetching by ‘Message-ID’, but do
not do a particularly excellent job at it. That is, ‘nnmbox’,
‘nnbabyl’, ‘nnmaildir’, ‘nnml’, are able to locate articles from any
groups, while ‘nnfolder’, and ‘nnimap’ are only able to locate articles
that have been posted to the current group. ‘nnmh’ does not support
this at all.
Fortunately, the special ‘nnregistry’ back end is able to locate
articles in any groups, regardless of their back end (fetching by
‘Message-ID’ using the registry Registry Article Refer Method.).
Info Catalog
gnus: Summary Sorting
gnus: Summary Buffer
gnus: Alternative Approaches