3.18.4 Article Washing

We call this “article washing” for a really good reason. Namely, the A key was taken, so we had to use the W key instead.

Washing is defined by us as “changing something from something to something else”, but normally results in something looking better. Cleaner, perhaps.

See Customizing Articles, if you want to change how Gnus displays articles by default.

C-u g

This is not really washing, it’s sort of the opposite of washing. If you type this, you see the article exactly as it exists on disk or on the server.

g

Force redisplaying of the current article (gnus-summary-show-article). This is also not really washing. If you type this, you see the article without any previously applied interactive Washing functions but with all default treatments (see Customizing Articles).

W l

Remove page breaks from the current article (gnus-summary-stop-page-breaking). See Misc Article, for page delimiters.

W r

Do a Caesar rotate (rot13) on the article buffer (gnus-summary-caesar-message). Unreadable articles that tell you to read them with Caesar rotate or rot13. (Typically offensive jokes and such.)

It’s commonly called “rot13” because each letter is rotated 13 positions in the alphabet, e.g., ‘B’ (letter #2) -> ‘O’ (letter #15). It is sometimes referred to as “Caesar rotate” because Caesar is rumored to have employed this form of, uh, somewhat weak encryption.

W m

Morse decode the article buffer (gnus-summary-morse-message).

W i

Decode IDNA encoded domain names in the current articles. IDNA encoded domain names looks like ‘xn--bar’. If a string remain unencoded after running invoking this, it is likely an invalid IDNA string (‘xn--bar’ is invalid). You must have GNU Libidn (http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/) installed for this command to work.

W t

t

Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer (gnus-summary-toggle-header).

W v

Toggle whether to display all headers in the article buffer permanently (gnus-summary-verbose-headers).

W o

Treat overstrike (gnus-article-treat-overstrike).

W d

Treat M****s*** sm*rtq**t*s according to gnus-article-dumbquotes-map (gnus-article-treat-dumbquotes). Note that this function guesses whether a character is a sm*rtq**t* or not, so it should only be used interactively.

Sm*rtq**t*s are M****s***’s unilateral extension to the character map in an attempt to provide more quoting characters. If you see something like \222 or \264 where you’re expecting some kind of apostrophe or quotation mark, then try this wash.

W U

Translate many non-ASCII characters into their ASCII equivalents (gnus-article-treat-non-ascii). This is mostly useful if you’re on a terminal that has a limited font and doesn’t show accented characters, “advanced” punctuation, and the like. For instance, ‘»’ is translated into ‘>>’, and so on.

W Y f

Full deuglify of broken Outlook (Express) articles: Treat dumbquotes, unwrap lines, repair attribution and rearrange citation. (gnus-article-outlook-deuglify-article).

W Y u

Unwrap lines that appear to be wrapped citation lines. You can control what lines will be unwrapped by frobbing gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-min and gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-max, indicating the minimum and maximum length of an unwrapped citation line. (gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines).

W Y a

Repair a broken attribution line.
(gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution).

W Y c

Repair broken citations by rearranging the text. (gnus-article-outlook-rearrange-citation).

W w

Do word wrap (gnus-article-fill-cited-article).

You can give the command a numerical prefix to specify the width to use when filling.

W Q

Fill long lines (gnus-article-fill-long-lines).

W C

Capitalize the first word in each sentence (gnus-article-capitalize-sentences).

W c

Translate CRLF pairs (i.e., ‘^M’s on the end of the lines) into LF (this takes care of DOS line endings), and then translate any remaining CRs into LF (this takes care of Mac line endings) (gnus-article-remove-cr).

W q

Treat quoted-printable (gnus-article-de-quoted-unreadable). Quoted-Printable is one common MIME encoding employed when sending non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. It typically makes strings like ‘déjà vu’ look like ‘d=E9j=E0 vu’, which doesn’t look very readable to me. Note that this is usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a Content-Transfer-Encoding header that says that this encoding has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.

W 6

Treat base64 (gnus-article-de-base64-unreadable). Base64 is one common MIME encoding employed when sending non-ASCII (i.e., 8-bit) articles. Note that this is usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a Content-Transfer-Encoding header that says that this encoding has been done. If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for.

W Z

Treat HZ or HZP (gnus-article-decode-HZ). HZ (or HZP) is one common encoding employed when sending Chinese articles. It typically makes strings look like ‘~{<:Ky2;S{#,NpJ)l6HK!#~}’.

W A

Translate ANSI SGR control sequences into overlays or extents (gnus-article-treat-ansi-sequences). ANSI sequences are used in some Chinese hierarchies for highlighting.

W u

Remove newlines from within URLs. Some mailers insert newlines into outgoing email messages to keep lines short. This reformatting can split long URLs onto multiple lines. Repair those URLs by removing the newlines (gnus-article-unsplit-urls).

W h

Treat HTML (gnus-article-wash-html). Note that this is usually done automatically by Gnus if the message in question has a Content-Type header that says that the message is HTML.

If a prefix is given, a charset will be asked for. If it is a number, the charset defined in gnus-summary-show-article-charset-alist (see Paging the Article) will be used.

The default is to use the function specified by mm-text-html-renderer (see Display Customization in The Emacs MIME Manual) to convert the HTML. Pre-defined functions you can use include:

shr

Use Gnus simple html renderer.

gnus-w3m

Use Gnus rendered based on w3m.

w3m

Use emacs-w3m.

w3m-standalone

Use w3m.

links

Use Links.

lynx

Use Lynx.

html2text

Use html2text—a simple HTML converter included with Gnus.

W b

Add clickable buttons to the article (gnus-article-add-buttons). See Article Buttons.

W B

Add clickable buttons to the article headers (gnus-article-add-buttons-to-head).

W p

Verify a signed control message (gnus-article-verify-x-pgp-sig). Control messages such as newgroup and checkgroups are usually signed by the hierarchy maintainer. You need to add the PGP public key of the maintainer to your keyring to verify the message.¹

W s

Verify a signed (PGP, PGP/MIME or S/MIME) message (gnus-summary-force-verify-and-decrypt). See Security.

W a

Strip headers like the X-No-Archive header from the beginning of article bodies (gnus-article-strip-headers-in-body).

W E l

Remove all blank lines from the beginning of the article (gnus-article-strip-leading-blank-lines).

W E m

Replace all blank lines with empty lines and then all multiple empty lines with a single empty line. (gnus-article-strip-multiple-blank-lines).

W E t

Remove all blank lines at the end of the article (gnus-article-remove-trailing-blank-lines).

W E a

Do all the three commands above (gnus-article-strip-blank-lines).

W E A

Remove all blank lines (gnus-article-strip-all-blank-lines).

W E s

Remove all white space from the beginning of all lines of the article body (gnus-article-strip-leading-space).

W E e

Remove all white space from the end of all lines of the article body (gnus-article-strip-trailing-space).

See Customizing Articles, for how to wash articles automatically.