Re: Trimming email replies in gnus/message-mode

On 04/23/26 22:59 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> 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.

Thank you :-) . That is very close to what I was thinking about. I'll try it
out, and maybe adapt it a bit.

-- 
/Martin