Quoth Adam Wolfe Gordon on Feb 21 at 9:49 am: > On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 22:59, Austin Clements <amdragon@mit.edu> wrote: > > I've been thinking about this more. message-mode's default citation > > line is really unfortunate and quite possibly insane ("writes" isn't > > even the right tense and what's up with that extra line break?). The > > option to change this is also well hidden (as an experiment, I tried > > navigating to it through customize and couldn't figure out where it > > was, even though I knew what I was looking for). In general, I'm a > > fan of inheriting as many options from Emacs as possible, but people > > *are* going to ask how to change this and the default setting *is* > > going to turn people off of notmuch ("What mail client do you use that > > generates those quirky citation lines?" "I use notmuch!" "Is that, > > like, from the 80's?"). > > Agreed. It's a really unfortunate default. > > > So, what about adding a notmuch customize option for selecting the > > citation line format? It could offer a few const choices, including a > > default, sane format, plus the option to enter your own or to fall > > back to whatever message-mode is configured to do. If we do this, > > it's probably best done in a follow-up series, but this seemed like an > > appropriate place to bring it up. > > I think there are two options, which have been discussed a bit before [1]: Ah, interesting. I hadn't been following this series at that point. > 1) Wrap the citation format with a notmuch customization variable, > notmuch-citation-line-format or somesuch. Then set the > message-citation-line-format before calling message-cite-original. > > 2) Have notmuch load a user config file (~/.notmuch.el or something) > on startup, and provide a default file that sets nice defaults for > things like message-citation-line-format. The default file could even > be constructed on first run, such that if the user has already > customized some things (like message-citation-line-format) we can keep > their settings. > > Option 2 is obviously more work, but I think it's the right way to go, > at least in the long run. In addition to giving a place to provide > nice defaults for non-notmuch variables, it gives the user a nice > place to specify notmuch-specific config. For example, I use > completely separate init files for notmuch and other emacs usage, and > having a notmuch config file would let me get away from this slightly > kludgey setup. That is an intriguing idea. My main concern would be forwards-compatibility. When we find some other variable that we want to add to this file, what do we do with already-generated .notmuch.els? I wouldn't dismiss option 1, though. From a user's perspective, it is visible that they're using message-mode to edit message drafts and hence natural that they would customize message-mode to control editing behavior, but they create a reply by pressing 'r' in a *notmuch* buffer, which naturally associates the operation with notmuch, not message-mode. I would go so far as to say reply's use of message-mode is an implementation detail. Hence, I would never expect an uninformed user to guess that they have to go to message-mode to customize the citation format. > In either case, this can probably come as a separate patch series, but > it is good to start discussing it here. > > [1] id:"m2mx9i3onw.fsf@wal122.wireless-pennnet.upenn.edu"