Info Catalog
gnus: Symbolic Prefixes
gnus: Various
gnus: Window Layout
9.4 Formatting Variables
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Throughout this manual you’ve probably noticed lots of variables called
things like ‘gnus-group-line-format’ and
‘gnus-summary-mode-line-format’. These control how Gnus is to output
lines in the various buffers. There’s quite a lot of them.
Fortunately, they all use the same syntax, so there’s not that much to
be annoyed by.
Here’s an example format spec (from the group buffer): ‘%M%S%5y:
%(%g%)\n’. We see that it is indeed extremely ugly, and that there are
lots of percentages everywhere.
· Formatting Basics A formatting variable is basically a format string.
· Mode Line Formatting Some rules about mode line formatting variables.
· Advanced Formatting Modifying output in various ways.
· User-Defined Specs Having Gnus call your own functions.
· Formatting Fonts Making the formatting look colorful and nice.
· Positioning Point Moving point to a position after an operation.
· Tabulation Tabulating your output.
· Wide Characters Dealing with wide characters.
Currently Gnus uses the following formatting variables:
‘gnus-group-line-format’, ‘gnus-summary-line-format’,
‘gnus-server-line-format’, ‘gnus-topic-line-format’,
‘gnus-group-mode-line-format’, ‘gnus-summary-mode-line-format’,
‘gnus-article-mode-line-format’, ‘gnus-server-mode-line-format’, and
‘gnus-summary-pick-line-format’.
All these format variables can also be arbitrary elisp forms. In
that case, they will be ‘eval’ed to insert the required lines.
Gnus includes a command to help you while creating your own format
specs. ‘M-x gnus-update-format’ will ‘eval’ the current form, update
the spec in question and pop you to a buffer where you can examine the
resulting Lisp code to be run to generate the line.