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]: 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. 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"