3.18.3 Article Hiding

Or rather, hiding certain things in each article. There usually is much too much cruft in most articles.

W W a

Do quite a lot of hiding on the article buffer (gnus-article-hide). In particular, this function will hide headers, PGP, cited text and the signature.

W W h

Hide headers (gnus-article-hide-headers). See Hiding Headers.

W W b

Hide headers that aren’t particularly interesting (gnus-article-hide-boring-headers). See Hiding Headers.

W W s

Hide signature (gnus-article-hide-signature). See Article Signature.

W W l

Strip list identifiers specified in gnus-list-identifiers. These are strings some mailing list servers add to the beginning of all Subject headers—for example, ‘[zebra 4711]’. Any leading ‘Re: ’ is skipped before stripping. gnus-list-identifiers may not contain \\(..\\).

gnus-list-identifiers

A regular expression that matches list identifiers to be removed from subject. This can also be a list of regular expressions.

W W P

Hide PEM (privacy enhanced messages) cruft (gnus-article-hide-pem).

W W B

Strip the banner specified by the banner group parameter (gnus-article-strip-banner). This is mainly used to hide those annoying banners and/or signatures that some mailing lists and moderated groups adds to all the messages. The way to use this function is to add the banner group parameter (see Group Parameters) to the group you want banners stripped from. The parameter either be a string, which will be interpreted as a regular expression matching text to be removed, or the symbol signature, meaning that the (last) signature should be removed, or other symbol, meaning that the corresponding regular expression in gnus-article-banner-alist is used.

For instance:

(setq gnus-article-banner-alist
      ((googleGroups .
       "^\n*--~--~---------\\(.+\n\\)+")))

Regardless of a group, you can hide things like advertisements only when the sender of an article has a certain mail address specified in gnus-article-address-banner-alist.

gnus-article-address-banner-alist

Alist of mail addresses and banners. Each element has the form (address . banner), where address is a regexp matching a mail address in the From header, banner is one of a symbol signature, an item in gnus-article-banner-alist, a regexp and nil. If address matches author’s mail address, it will remove things like advertisements. For example, if a sender has the mail address ‘hail@yoo-hoo.co.jp’ and there is a banner something like ‘Do You Yoo-hoo!?’ in all articles he sends, you can use the following element to remove them:

("@yoo-hoo\\.co\\.jp\\'" .
 "\n_+\nDo You Yoo-hoo!\\?\n.*\n.*\n")

W W c

Hide citation (gnus-article-hide-citation). Some variables for customizing the hiding:

gnus-cited-opened-text-button-line-format

gnus-cited-closed-text-button-line-format

Gnus adds buttons to show where the cited text has been hidden, and to allow toggle hiding the text. The format of the variable is specified by these format-like variable (see Formatting Variables). These specs are valid:

‘b’

Starting point of the hidden text.

‘e’

Ending point of the hidden text.

‘l’

Number of characters in the hidden region.

‘n’

Number of lines of hidden text.

gnus-cited-lines-visible

The number of lines at the beginning of the cited text to leave shown. This can also be a cons cell with the number of lines at the top and bottom of the text, respectively, to remain visible.

W W C-c

Hide citation (gnus-article-hide-citation-maybe) depending on the following two variables:

gnus-cite-hide-percentage

If the cited text is of a bigger percentage than this variable (default 50), hide the cited text.

gnus-cite-hide-absolute

The cited text must have at least this length (default 10) before it is hidden.

W W C

Hide cited text in articles that aren’t roots (gnus-article-hide-citation-in-followups). This isn’t very useful as an interactive command, but might be a handy function to stick have happen automatically (see Customizing Articles).

All these “hiding” commands are toggles, but if you give a negative prefix to these commands, they will show what they have previously hidden. If you give a positive prefix, they will always hide.

Also see Article Highlighting for further variables for citation customization.

See Customizing Articles, for how to hide article elements automatically.