Recognizing Citations Top Emacs 19 MUAs
Hitting C-c C-y in your MUA's reply buffer yanks and cites the
original message into the reply buffer. In reality, the citation of the
original message is performed via a call through a configurable hook
variable. The name of this variable has been agreed to in advance as
part of the citation interface specification. By default this
hook variable has a nil
value, which the MUA recognizes to mean,
``use your default citation function''. When you add Supercite's
citation function to the hook, thereby giving the variable a
non-nil
value, it tells the MUA to run the hook via
run-hooks
instead of using the default citation.
Early in Supercite's development, the Supercite author, a few MUA
authors, and some early Supercite users got together and agreed upon a
standard interface between MUAs and citation packages (of which
Supercite is currently the only known add-on :-)
. With the recent
release of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Emacs 19, the interface
has undergone some modification and it is possible that not all MUAs
support the new interface yet. Some support only the old interface and
some do not support the interface at all. Still, it is possible for all
known MUAs to use Supercite, and the following sections will outline the
procedures you need to follow.
To learn exactly how to connect Supercite to the software systems you are using, read the appropriate following sections. For details on the interface specifications, or if you are writing or maintaining an MUA, see Hints to MUA Authors.
The first thing that everyone should do, regardless of the MUA you are
using is to set up Emacs so it will load Supercite at the appropriate
time. You can either dump Supercite into your Emacs binary (ask your
local Emacs guru how to do this if you don't know), or you can set up an
autoload for Supercite. To do the latter, put the following in
your `.emacs
' file:
(autoload 'sc-cite-original "supercite" "Supercite 3.1" t) (autoload 'sc-submit-bug-report "supercite" "Supercite 3.1" t)
The function sc-cite-original
is the top-level Supercite function
designed to be run from the citation hook. It expects
`point
' and `mark
' to be set around the region to cite, and it
expects the original article's mail headers to be present within this
region. Note that Supercite never touches any text outside this
region. Note further that for Emacs 19, the region need not be active
for sc-cite-original
to do its job.
See Hints to MUA Authors.
The other step in the getting connected process is to make sure your
MUA calls sc-cite-original
at the right time. As mentioned
above, some MUAs handle this differently. Read the sections that follow
pertaining to the MUAs you are using.
One final note. After Supercite is loaded into your Emacs session, it
runs the hook sc-load-hook
. You can put any customizations into
this hook since it is only run once. This will not work, however, if
your Emacs maintainer has put Supercite into your dumped Emacs' image.
In that case, you can use the sc-pre-hook
variable, but this will
get executed every time sc-cite-original
is called. See Reply Buffer Initialization.