Group Buffer Format Group Modeline Specification
The default format of the group buffer is nice and dull, but you can make it as exciting and ugly as you feel like.
Here's a couple of example group lines:
25: news.announce.newusers * 0: alt.fan.andrea-dworkin
Quite simple, huh?
You can see that there are 25 unread articles in
`news.announce.newusers
'. There are no unread articles, but some
ticked articles, in `alt.fan.andrea-dworkin
' (see that little
asterisk at the beginning of the line?).
You can change that format to whatever you want by fiddling with the
gnus-group-line-format
variable. This variable works along the
lines of a format
specification, which is pretty much the same as
a printf
specifications, for those of you who use (feh!) C.
See Formatting Variables.
`%M%S%5y: %(%g%)\n
' is the value that produced those lines above.
There should always be a colon on the line; the cursor always moves to the colon after performing an operation. Nothing else is required---not even the group name. All displayed text is just window dressing, and is never examined by Gnus. Gnus stores all real information it needs using text properties.
(Note that if you make a really strange, wonderful, spreadsheet-like layout, everybody will believe you are hard at work with the accounting instead of wasting time reading news.)
Here's a list of all available format characters:
`M '
|
An asterisk if the group only has marked articles. |
`S '
|
Whether the group is subscribed. |
`L '
|
Level of subscribedness. |
`N '
|
Number of unread articles. |
`I '
|
Number of dormant articles. |
`T '
|
Number of ticked articles. |
`R '
|
Number of read articles. |
`t '
|
Estimated total number of articles. (This is really max-number minus min-number plus 1.) |
`y '
|
Number of unread, unticked, non-dormant articles. |
`i '
|
Number of ticked and dormant articles. |
`g '
|
Full group name. |
`G '
|
Group name. |
`D '
|
Newsgroup description. |
`o '
|
` |
`O '
|
` |
`s '
|
Select method. |
`n '
|
Select from where. |
`z '
|
A string that looks like ` |
`P '
|
Indentation based on the level of the topic (see Group Topics). |
`c '
|
Short (collapsed) group name. The |
`m '
|
` |
`d '
|
A string that says when you last read the group (see Group Timestamp). |
`u '
|
User defined specifier. The next character in the format string should
be a letter. Gnus will call the function
|
All the ``number-of'' specs will be filled with an asterisk (`*
')
if no info is available---for instance, if it is a non-activated foreign
group, or a bogus native group.