Re: Trimming email replies in gnus/message-mode

Martin Kjær Jørgensen <[email protected]> writes:

> Hey,
>
> To those of you who uses gnus+message-mode in your daily lives; how do you
> trim quoted text when replying (posting) emails? 
>
> Do you manually remove excess reply level texts, or do you have some function
> or enabled variables that takes care of it automatically? Especially when
> dealing with "large" replies.

If I understand your question/problem correctly, then you
want to be able to remove successive levels of replies, from
the outermost through any number of levels down possibly to
the innermost.

   > level 1
   > 
   > > level 2
   > > 
   > > > level 3
   > > >
   > > > > level 4

So, you could remove level 1 and then have:

   > level 2
   > 
   > > level 3
   > >
   > > > level 4

You could remove level 2 (now at level 1) and then have:

   > level 3
   >
   > > level 4

And so on, depending on what you wanted in your reply.

If this describes the problem that you want correctly, then
here is command definition that you could try:

(require 'message)

(defun delete-top-level ()
  "Delete the top-level reply lines from a buffer in Message mode."
  (interactive)
  (if (eq major-mode 'message-mode)
      ;; Restrict all editing to lines from the beginning of the message
      ;; body down to either the line before the signature or the end of
      ;; the buffer, if there is no signature.
      (let ((begin (progn
                     (message-goto-body)
                     (point)))
            (end (progn
                   (when (message-goto-signature)
                     (forward-line -2))
                   (point))))
        ;; Delete all lines that have either:
        ;;   - only a ‘>’ on the line
        ;;   - a line that starts with ‘>’, followed by at least one
        ;;     non-‘>’ character, followed by any character
        (delete-matching-lines "^>$\\|^>[^>].*$" begin end)

        ;; In the lines that remain, replace any lines that:
        ;;   - start with a ‘>’, followed by any characters
        ;; with a line that:
        ;;   - consists of all of the characters after the
        ;;     ‘>’ character
        (replace-regexp "^>\\(.*\\)" "\\1" nil begin end))
    ;; Otherwise...
    (user-error "This command only works in message buffers")))

You would run this command in a Message buffer after you
yanked the original (for example, using
‘message-yank-original’).

Note that ‘replace-regexp’ is supposed to be used
interactively only.  In Elisp code, the functions
‘re-search-forward’ and ‘replace-match’ are supposed to be
used instead.  I am leaving replacement of ‘replace-regexp’
as an exercise.

-- 
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.
- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Birds.