www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/emacs/gnus_131.html

search

	Buy the book!

Gnus Manual

5.5 Posting Styles

All them variables, they make my head swim.

So what if you want a different Organization and signature based on what groups you post to? And you post both from your home machine and your work machine, and you want different From lines, and so on?

One way to do stuff like that is to write clever hooks that change the variables you need to have changed. That's a bit boring, so somebody came up with the bright idea of letting the user specify these things in a handy alist. Here's an example of a gnus-posting-styles variable:

((".*" (signature "Peace and happiness") (organization "What me?")) ("^comp" (signature "Death to everybody")) ("comp.emacs.i-love-it" (organization "Emacs is it")))

As you might surmise from this example, this alist consists of several styles. Each style will be applicable if the first element "matches", in some form or other. The entire alist will be iterated over, from the beginning towards the end, and each match will be applied, which means that attributes in later styles that match override the same attributes in earlier matching styles. So `comp.programming.literate' will have the `Death to everybody' signature and the `What me?' Organization header.

The first element in each style is called the match. If it's a string, then Gnus will try to regexp match it against the group name. If it is the symbol header, then Gnus will look for header that match the next element in the match, and compare that to the last header in the match. If it's a function symbol, that function will be called with no arguments. If it's a variable symbol, then the variable will be referenced. If it's a list, then that list will be evaled. In any case, if this returns a non-nil value, then the style is said to match.

Each style may contain a arbitrary amount of attributes. Each attribute consists of a (name . value) pair. The attribute name can be one of signature, signature-file, organization, address, name or body. The attribute name can also be a string. In that case, this will be used as a header name, and the value will be inserted in the headers of the article; if the value is nil, the header name will be removed. If the attribute name is eval, the form is evaluated, and the result is thrown away.

The attribute value can be a string (used verbatim), a function with zero arguments (the return value will be used), a variable (its value will be used) or a list (it will be evaled and the return value will be used). The functions and sexps are called/evaled in the message buffer that is being set up. The headers of the current article are available through the message-reply-headers variable.

If you wish to check whether the message you are about to compose is meant to be a news article or a mail message, you can check the values of the message-news-p and message-mail-p functions.

So here's a new example:

(setq gnus-posting-styles '((".*" (signature-file "~/.signature") (name "User Name") ("X-Home-Page" (getenv "WWW_HOME")) (organization "People's Front Against MWM")) ("^rec.humor" (signature my-funny-signature-randomizer)) ((equal (system-name) "gnarly") (signature my-quote-randomizer)) ((message-news-p) (signature my-news-signature)) (header "From\\|To" "larsi.*org" (Organization "Somewhere, Inc.")) ((posting-from-work-p) (signature-file "~/.work-signature") (address "user@bar.foo") (body "You are fired.\n\nSincerely, your boss.") (organization "Important Work, Inc")) ("nnml:.*" (From (save-excursion (set-buffer gnus-article-buffer) (message-fetch-field "to")))) ("^nn.+:" (signature-file "~/.mail-signature"))))

The `nnml:.*' rule means that you use the To address as the From address in all your outgoing replies, which might be handy if you fill many roles.