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##### Question 4.14

I don't like the way the Summary buffer looks, how to tweak it?

##### Answer

You've got to play around with the variable gnus-summary-line-format. It's value is a string of symbols which stand for things like author, date, subject etc. A list of the available specifiers can be found in the manual node "Summary Buffer Lines" and the often forgotten node "Formatting Variables" and it's sub-nodes. There you'll find useful things like positioning the cursor and tabulators which allow you a summary in table form, but sadly hard tabulators are broken in 5.8.8.

Since 5.10, Gnus offers you some very nice new specifiers, e.g. %B which draws a thread-tree and %&user-date which gives you a date where the details are dependent of the articles age. Here's an example which uses both:

         (setq gnus-summary-line-format ":%U%R %B %s %-60=|%4L |%-20,20f |%&user-date; \n")

resulting in:

         :O     Re: [Richard Stallman] rfc2047.el          |  13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:06
         :O     Re: Revival of the ding-patches list       |  13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:12
         :R  >  Re: Find correct list of articles for a gro|  25 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:16
         :O  \->  ...                                      |  21 |Kai Grossjohann      | 0:01
         :R  >  Re: Cry for help: deuglify.el - moving stuf|  28 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:34
         :O  \->  ...                                      | 115 |Raymond Scholz       | 1:24
         :O    \->  ...                                    |  19 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |15:33
         :O     Slow mailing list                          |  13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:49
         :O     Re: `@' mark not documented                |  13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:50
         :R  >  Re: Gnus still doesn't count messages prope|  23 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt |Sat 23:57
         :O  \->  ...                                      |  18 |Kai Grossjohann      | 0:35
         :O    \->  ...                                    |  13 |Lars Magne Ingebrigt | 0:56