9.4.5 Formatting Fonts

There are specs for highlighting, and these are shared by all the format variables. Text inside the ‘%(’ and ‘%)’ specifiers will get the special mouse-face property set, which means that it will be highlighted (with gnus-mouse-face) when you put the mouse pointer over it.

Text inside the ‘%{’ and ‘%}’ specifiers will have their normal faces set using gnus-face-0, which is bold by default. If you say ‘%1{’, you’ll get gnus-face-1 instead, and so on. Create as many faces as you wish. The same goes for the mouse-face specs—you can say ‘%3(hello%)’ to have ‘hello’ mouse-highlighted with gnus-mouse-face-3.

Text inside the ‘%<<’ and ‘%>>’ specifiers will get the special balloon-help property set to gnus-balloon-face-0. If you say ‘%1<<’, you’ll get gnus-balloon-face-1 and so on. The gnus-balloon-face-* variables should be either strings or symbols naming functions that return a string. When the mouse passes over text with this property set, a balloon window will appear and display the string. Please refer to Tooltips in The Emacs Manual, (in Emacs) or the doc string of balloon-help-mode (in XEmacs) for more information on this. (For technical reasons, the guillemets have been approximated as ‘<<’ and ‘>>’ in this paragraph.)

Here’s an alternative recipe for the group buffer:

;; Create three face types.
(setq gnus-face-1 'bold)
(setq gnus-face-3 'italic)

;; We want the article count to be in
;; a bold and green face.  So we create
;; a new face called my-green-bold.
(copy-face 'bold 'my-green-bold)
;; Set the color.
(set-face-foreground 'my-green-bold "ForestGreen")
(setq gnus-face-2 'my-green-bold)

;; Set the new & fancy format.
(setq gnus-group-line-format
      "%M%S%3{%5y%}%2[:%] %(%1{%g%}%)\n")

I’m sure you’ll be able to use this scheme to create totally unreadable and extremely vulgar displays. Have fun!

Note that the ‘%(’ specs (and friends) do not make any sense on the mode-line variables.