Supercite

1.1 Usage Overview

Typical usage is as follows. You want to reply or followup to a message in your MUA. You will probably hit r (i.e., “reply”) or f (i.e., “forward”) to begin composing the reply. In response, the MUA will create a reply buffer and initialize the outgoing mail headers appropriately. The body of the reply will usually be empty at this point. You now decide that you would like to include part of the original message in your reply. To do this, you yank the original message into the reply buffer, typically with a key stroke such as C-c C-y. This sequence will invoke an MUA-specific function which fills the body of the reply with the original message and then attributes this text to its author. This is called citing and its effect is to prefix every line from the original message with a special text tag. Most MUAs provide some default style of citing; by using Supercite you gain a wider flexibility in the look and style of citations. Supercite’s only job is to cite the original message.

1.2 What Supercite Doesn’t Do

Because of this clear division of labor, there are useful features which are the sole responsibility of the MUA, even though it might seem that Supercite should provide them. For example, many people would like to be able to yank (and cite) only a portion of the original message. Since Supercite only modifies the text it finds in the reply buffer as set up by the MUA, it is the MUA’s responsibility to do partial yanking. See Reply Buffer Initialization.

Another potentially useful thing would be for Supercite to set up the outgoing mail headers with information it gleans from the reply buffer. But by previously agreed upon convention, any text above the mail-header-separator which separates mail headers from message bodies cannot be modified by Supercite. Supercite, in fact, doesn’t know anything about the meaning of these headers, and never ventures outside the designated region. See Hints to MUA Authors, for more details.

1.3 What Supercite Does

Supercite is invoked for the first time on a reply buffer via your MUA’s reply or forward command. This command will actually perform citations by calling a hook variable to which Supercite’s top-level function sc-cite-original has been added. When sc-cite-original is executed, the original message must be set up in a very specific way, but this is handled automatically by the MUA. See Hints to MUA Authors.

The first thing Supercite does, via sc-cite-original, is to parse through the original message’s mail headers. It saves this data in an information association list, or info alist. The information in this list is used in a number of places throughout Supercite. See Information Keys and the Info Alist.

After the mail header info is extracted, the headers are optionally removed (nuked) from the reply. Supercite then writes a reference header into the buffer. This reference header is a string carrying details about the citation it is about to perform.

Next, Supercite visits each line in the reply, transforming the line according to a customizable “script”. Lines which were not previously cited in the original message are given a citation, while already cited lines remain untouched, or are coerced to your preferred style. Finally, Supercite installs a keymap into the reply buffer so that you have access to Supercite’s post-yank formatting and reciting commands as you subsequently edit your reply. You can tell that Supercite has been installed into the reply buffer because that buffer’s modeline will display the minor mode string ‘SC’.

When the original message is cited by sc-cite-original, it will (optionally) be filled by Supercite. However, if you manually edit the cited text and want to re-fill it, you must use an add-on package such as filladapt or gin-mode. These packages can recognize Supercited text and will fill them appropriately. Emacs’s built-in filling routines, e.g., fill-paragraph, do not recognize cited text and will not re-fill them properly because it cannot guess the fill-prefix being used. See Post-yank Formatting Commands, for details.

As mentioned above, Supercite provides commands to recite or uncite regions of text in the reply buffer, and commands to perform other beautifications on the cited original text, maintaining consistent and informative citations throughout. Supercite tries to be as configurable as possible to allow for a wide range of personalized citation styles, but it is also immediately useful with the default configuration, once it has been properly connected to your MUA. See Getting Connected, for more details.

2.1 Citation Elements

Citation strings are composed of one or more elements. Non-nested citations are composed of four elements, three of which are directly user definable. The elements are concatenated together, in this order:

1. The citation leader. The citation leader is contained in the variable sc-citation-leader, and has the default value of a string containing four spaces.
2. The attribution string. This element is supplied automatically by Supercite, based on your preferences and the original message’s mail headers, though you may be asked to confirm Supercite’s choice. See Selecting an Attribution, for more details.
3. The citation delimiter. This string, contained in the variable sc-citation-delimiter visually separates the citation from the text of the line. This variable has a default value of ">" and for best results, the string should consist of only a single character.
4. The citation separator. The citation separator is contained in the variable sc-citation-separator, and has the default value of a string containing a single space.

For example, suppose you were using the default values for the above variables, and Supercite provided the attribution string ‘Jane’. In this case, the composed, non-nested citation string used might be something like " Jane> ". This citation string will be inserted in front of every line in the original message that is not already cited.

Nested citations, being simpler than non-nested citations, are composed of the same elements, sans the attribution string. Supercite is smart enough to not put additional spaces between citation delimiters for multi-level nested citations.

2.2 Recognizing Citations

Supercite also recognizes citations in the original article, and can transform these already cited lines in a number of ways. This is how Supercite suppresses the multiple citing of non-nested citations. Recognition of cited lines is controlled by variables analogous to those that make up the citation string as mentioned previously.

The variable sc-citation-leader-regexp describes how citation leaders can look, by default it matches any number of spaces or tabs. Note that since the lisp function looking-at is used to do the matching, if you change this variable it need not start with a leading "^".

Similarly, the variables sc-citation-delimiter-regexp and sc-citation-separator-regexp respectively describe how citation delimiters and separators can look. They follow the same rule as sc-citation-leader-regexp above.

When Supercite composes a citation string, it provides the attribution automatically. The analogous variable which handles recognition of the attribution part of citation strings is sc-citation-root-regexp. This variable describes the attribution root for both nested and non-nested citations. By default it can match zero-to-many alphanumeric characters (also “.”, “-”, and “_”). But in some situations, Supercite has to determine whether it is looking at a nested or non-nested citation. Thus the variable sc-citation-nonnested-root-regexp is used to describe only non-nested citation roots. It is important to remember that if you change sc-citation-root-regexp you should always also change sc-citation-nonnested-root-regexp.

4.1 The Built-in Header Rewrite Functions

Below are examples of the various built-in header rewrite functions. Please note the following: first, the text which appears in the examples below as infokey indicates that the corresponding value of the info key from the info alist will be inserted there. (see Information Keys and the Info Alist). For example, in sc-header-on-said below, date and from correspond to the values of the ‘Date:’ and ‘From:’ mail headers respectively.

Also, the string ">>>>>" below is really the value of the variable sc-reference-tag-string. This variable is used in all built-in header rewrite functions, and you can customize its value to change the tag string globally.

Finally, the references headers actually written may omit certain parts of the header if the info key associated with infokey is not present in the info alist. In fact, for all built-in headers, if the ‘From:’ field is not present in the mail headers, the entire reference header will be omitted (but this usually signals a serious problem either in your MUA or in Supercite’s installation).

sc-no-header

This function produces no header. It should be used instead of nil to produce a blank header. This header can possibly contain a blank line after the mail-header-separator line.

sc-no-blank-line-or-header ¶

This function is similar to sc-no-header except that any blank line after the mail-header-separator line will be removed.

sc-header-on-said ¶

>>>>> On date, from said:

sc-header-inarticle-writes ¶

>>>>> In article message-id, from writes:

sc-header-regarding-adds ¶

>>>>> Regarding subject; from adds:

sc-header-attributed-writes ¶

>>>>> "sc-attribution" == sc-author <sc-reply-address> writes:

sc-header-author-writes ¶

>>>>> sc-author writes:

sc-header-verbose ¶

>>>>> On date,
>>>>> sc-author
>>>>> from the organization of organization
>>>>> who can be reached at: sc-reply-address
>>>>> (whose comments are cited below with: "sc-cite")
>>>>> had this to say in article message-id
>>>>> in newsgroups newsgroups
>>>>> concerning the subject of subject
>>>>> see references for more details

4.2 Electric References

By default, when Supercite cites the original message for the first time, it just goes ahead and inserts the reference header indexed by sc-preferred-header-style. However, you may want to select different reference headers based on the type of reply or forwarding you are doing. You may also want to preview the reference header before deciding whether to insert it into the reply buffer or not. Supercite provides an optional electric reference mode which you can drop into to give you this functionality.

If the variable sc-electric-references-p is non-nil, Supercite will bring up an electric reference mode buffer and place you into a recursive edit. The electric reference buffer is read-only, so you cannot directly modify the reference text until you exit electric references and insert the text into the reply buffer. But you can cycle through all the reference header rewrite functions in your sc-rewrite-header-list.

You can also set a new preferred header style, jump to any header, or jump to the preferred header. The header will be shown in the electric reference buffer and the header index and function name will appear in the echo area.

The following commands are available while in electric reference mode (shown here with their default key bindings):

sc-eref-next (n) ¶

Displays the next reference header in the electric reference buffer. If the variable sc-electric-circular-p is non-nil, invoking sc-eref-next while viewing the last reference header in the list will wrap around to the first header.

sc-eref-prev (p) ¶

Displays the previous reference header in the electric reference buffer. If the variable sc-electric-circular-p is non-nil, invoking sc-eref-prev will wrap around to the last header.

sc-eref-goto (g) ¶

Goes to a specified reference header. The index (into the sc-rewrite-header-list) can be specified as a numeric argument to the command. Otherwise, Supercite will query you for the index in the minibuffer.

sc-eref-jump (j) ¶

Display the preferred reference header, i.e., the one indexed by the current value of sc-preferred-header-style.

sc-eref-setn (s) ¶

Set the preferred reference header (i.e., sc-preferred-header-style) to the currently displayed header.

sc-eref-exit (C-j, RET, and ESC C-c) ¶

Exit from electric reference mode and insert the current header into the reply buffer.

sc-eref-abort (q, x) ¶

Exit from electric reference mode without inserting the current header.

Supercite will execute the hook sc-electric-mode-hook before entering electric reference mode.

6.1 Reply Buffer Initialization

Executing sc-cite-original performs the following steps as it initializes the reply buffer:

1. Runs sc-pre-hook. This hook variable is run before sc-cite-original does any other work. You could conceivably use this hook to set certain Supercite variables based on the reply buffer’s mode or name (i.e., to do something different based on whether you are replying or following up to an article).
2. Inserts Supercite’s keymap. Supercite provides a number of commands for performing post-yank modifications to the reply buffer. These commands are installed on Supercite’s top-level keymap. Since Supercite has to interface with a wide variety of MUAs, it does not install all of its commands directly into the reply buffer’s keymap. Instead, it puts its commands on a keymap prefix, then installs this prefix onto the buffer’s keymap. What this means is that you typically have to type more characters to invoke a Supercite command, but Supercite’s key bindings can be made much more consistent across MUAs.

   You can control what key Supercite uses as its keymap prefix by changing the variable sc-mode-map-prefix. By default, this variable is set to C-c C-p; a finger twister perhaps, but unfortunately the best default due to the scarcity of available key bindings in many MUAs.

3. Turns on Supercite minor mode. The modeline of the reply buffer should indicate that Supercite is active in that buffer by displaying the string ‘SC’.
4. Sets the “Undo Boundary.” Supercite sets an undo boundary before it begins to modify the original yanked text. This allows you to easily undo Supercite’s changes to affect alternative citing styles.
5. Processes the mail headers. All previously retrieved info key-value pairs are deleted from the info alist, then the mail headers in the body of the yanked message are scanned. Info key-value pairs are created for each header found. Also, such useful information as the author’s name and email address are extracted. If the variable sc-mail-warn-if-non-rfc822-p is non-nil, then Supercite will warn you if it finds a mail header that does not conform to RFC 822 (or later). This is rare and indicates a problem either with your MUA or the original author’s MUA, or some MTA (mail transport agent) along the way.

   Once the info keys have been extracted from the mail headers, the headers are nuked from the reply buffer. You can control exactly which headers are removed or kept, but by default, all headers are removed.

   There are two variables which control mail header nuking. The variable sc-nuke-mail-headers controls the overall behavior of the header nuking routines. By setting this variable to 'all, you automatically nuke all mail headers. Likewise, setting this variable to 'none inhibits nuking of any mail headers. In between these extremes, you can tell Supercite to nuke only a specified list of mail headers by setting this variable to 'specified, or to keep only a specified list of headers by setting it to 'keep.

   If sc-nuke-mail-headers is set to 'specified or 'keep, then the variable sc-nuke-mail-header-list is consulted for the list of headers to nuke or keep. This variable contains a list of regular expressions. If the mail header line matches a regular expression in this list, the header will be nuked or kept. The line is matched against the regexp using looking-at rooted at the beginning of the line.

   If the variable sc-blank-lines-after-headers is non-nil, it contains the number of blank lines remaining in the buffer after mail headers are nuked. By default, only one blank line is left in the buffer.

6. Selects the attribution and citation strings. Once the mail headers have been processed, Supercite selects a attribution string and a citation string which it will use to cite the original message. See Selecting an Attribution, for details.
7. Cites the message body. After the selection of the attribution and citation strings, Supercite cites the original message by inserting the citation string prefix in front of every uncited line. You may not want Supercite to automatically cite very long messages however. For example, some email could contain a smaller header section followed by a huge uuencoded message. It wouldn’t make sense to cite the uuencoded message part when responding to the original author’s short preface. For this reason, Supercite provides a variable which limits the automatic citation of long messages to a certain maximum number of lines. The variable is called sc-cite-region-limit. If this variable contains an integer, messages with more lines that this will not be cited at all, and a warning message will be displayed. Supercite has performed everything necessary, though, for you to manually cite only the small portion of the original message that you want to use.

   If sc-cite-region-limit contains a non-nil value, the original message will always be cited, regardless of its size. If the variable contains the value nil, the region will never be cited automatically. Use this if you always want to be able to edit and cite the message manually.

   The variable sc-cite-blank-lines-p controls whether blank lines in the original message should be cited or not. If this variable is non-nil, blank lines will be cited just like non-blank lines. Otherwise, blank lines will be treated as paragraph separators.

   Citing of the original message is highly configurable. Supercite’s default setup does a pretty good job of citing many common forms of previously cited messages. But there are as many citation styles out there as people on the net, or just about! It would be impossible for Supercite to anticipate every style in existence, and you probably wouldn’t encounter them all anyway. But you can configure Supercite to recognize those styles you see often. See Configuring the Citation Engine, for details.

8. Runs sc-post-hook. This variable is very similar to sc-pre-hook, except that it runs after sc-cite-original is finished. This hook is provided mostly for completeness and backward compatibility. Perhaps it could be used to reset certain variables set in sc-pre-hook.

6.2 Filling Cited Text

Supercite will automatically fill newly cited text from the original message unless the variable sc-auto-fill-region-p has a nil value. Supercite will also re-fill paragraphs when you manually cite or re-cite text.

However, during normal editing, Supercite itself cannot be used to fill paragraphs. This is a change from version 2. There are other add-on lisp packages which do filling much better than Supercite ever did. The two best known are filladapt and gin-mode. Both work well with Supercite and both are available at the normal Emacs Lisp archive sites. gin-mode works pretty well out of the box, but if you use filladapt, you may want to run the function sc-setup-filladapt after loading supercite (e.g., using with-eval-after-load). This simply makes filladapt a little more Supercite savvy than its default setup.

Also, Supercite will collapse leading whitespace between the citation string and the text on a line when the variable sc-fixup-whitespace-p is non-nil. The default value for this variable is nil.

Its important to understand that Supercite’s automatic filling (during the initial citation of the reply) is very fragile. That is because figuring out the fill-prefix for a particular paragraph is a really hard thing to do automatically. This is especially the case when the original message contains code or some other text where leading whitespace is important to preserve. For this reason, many Supercite users typically run with sc-auto-fill-region-p (and possibly also sc-fixup-whitespace-p) set to nil. They then manually fill each cited paragraph in the reply buffer.

I usually run with both these variables containing their default values. When Supercite’s automatic filling breaks on a particular message, I will use Emacs’s undo feature to undo back before the citation was applied to the original message. Then I’ll toggle the variables and manually cite those paragraphs that I don’t want to fill or collapse whitespace on. See Variable Toggling Shortcuts.

If you find that Supercite’s automatic filling is just too fragile for your tastes, you might consider one of these alternate approaches. Also, to make life easier, a shortcut function to toggle the state of both of these variables is provided on the key binding C-c C-p C-p (with the default value of sc-mode-map-prefix; see Post-yank Formatting Commands).

You will noticed that the minor mode string will show the state of these variables as qualifier characters. When both variables are nil, the Supercite minor mode string will display ‘SC’. When just sc-auto-fill-region-p is non-nil, the string will display ‘SC:f’, and when just sc-fixup-whitespace-p is non-nil, the string will display ‘SC:w’. When both variables are non-nil, the string will display ‘SC:fw’. Note that the qualifiers chosen are mnemonics for the default bindings of the toggling function for each respective variable. See Variable Toggling Shortcuts.

Why are these variables not set to nil by default? It is because many users won’t manually fill paragraphs that are Supercited, and there have been widespread complaints on the net about mail and news messages containing lines greater than about 72 characters. So the default is to fill cited text.

7.1 Attribution Preferences

When you cite an original message, you can tell Supercite which part of the author’s name you would prefer it to use as the attribution. The variable sc-preferred-attribution-list controls this; it contains keys which are matched against the attribution alist in the given order. The first value of a key that produces a non-nil, non-empty string match is used as the attribution string, and if no keys match, a secondary mechanism is used to generate the attribution. See Anonymous Attributions.

The following preferences are always available in the attribution alist (barring error):

"emailname"

the author’s email terminus.

"initials"

the author’s initials.

"firstname"

the author’s first name.

"lastname"

the author’s last name.

"middlename-1"

the author’s first middle name.

"sc-lastchoice"

the last attribution string you have selected. This is useful when you recite paragraphs in the reply.

"sc-consult" ¶

consults the customizable list sc-attrib-selection-list which can be used to select special attributions based on the value of any info key. See below for details.

"x-attribution"

the original author’s suggestion for attribution string choice. See below for details.

Middle name indexes can be any positive integer greater than zero, though it is unlikely that many authors will have more than one middle name, if that many.

At this point, let me digress into a discussion of etiquette. It is my belief that while the style of the citations is a reflection of the personal tastes of the replier (i.e., you), the attribution selection is ultimately the personal choice of the original author. In a sense it is his or her “net nickname”, and therefore the author should have some say in the selection of attribution string. Imagine how you would feel if someone gave you a nickname that you didn’t like?

For this reason, Supercite recognizes a special mail header, ‘X-Attribution:’, which if present, tells Supercite the attribution string preferred by the original author. It is the value of this header that is associated with the "x-attribution" key in the attribution alist. Currently, you can override the preference of this key by changing sc-preferred-attribution-list, but that isn’t polite, and in the future Supercite may hard-code this. For now, it is suggested that if you change the order of the keys in this list, that "x-attribution" always be first, or possible second behind only "sc-lastchoice". This latter is the default.

The value "sc-consult" in sc-preferred-attribution-list has a special meaning during attribution selection. When Supercite encounters this preference, it begins processing a customizable list of attributions, contained in the variable sc-attrib-selection-list. Each element in this list contains lists of the following form:

(infokey ((regexp . attribution)
         (regexp . attribution)
         (…)))

where infokey is a key for sc-mail-field and regexp is a regular expression to match against the infokey’s value. If regexp matches the infokey’s value, the attribution is used as the attribution string. Actually, attribution can be a string or a list; if it is a list, it is evaluated and the return value (which must be a string), is used as the attribution.

This can be very useful for when you are replying to net acquaintances who do not use the ‘X-Attribution:’ mail header. You may know what nickname they would prefer to use, and you can set up this list to match against a specific mail field, e.g., ‘From:’, allowing you to cite your friend’s message with the appropriate attribution.

7.2 Anonymous Attributions

When the author’s name cannot be found in the ‘From:’ mail header, a fallback author name and attribution string must be supplied. The fallback author name is contained in the variable sc-default-author-name and the fallback attribution string is contained in the variable sc-default-attribution. Default values for these variables are "Anonymous" and "Anon", respectively. Note that in most circumstances, getting the default author name or attribution is a sign that something is set up incorrectly.

Also, if the preferred attribution, which you specified in your sc-preferred-attribution-list variable cannot be found, a secondary method can be employed to find a valid attribution string. The variable sc-use-only-preference-p controls what happens in this case. If the variable’s value is non-nil, then sc-default-author-name and sc-default-attribution are used, otherwise, the following steps are taken to find a valid attribution string, and the first step to return a non-nil, non-empty string becomes the attribution:

1. Use the last selected attribution, if there is one.
2. Use the value of the "x-attribution" key.
3. Use the author’s first name.
4. Use the author’s last name.
5. Use the author’s initials.
6. Find the first non-nil, non-empty attribution string in the attribution alist.
7. sc-default-attribution is used.

Once the attribution string has been automatically selected, a number of things can happen. If the variable sc-confirm-always-p is non-nil, you are queried for confirmation of the chosen attribution string. The possible values for completion are those strings in the attribution alist, however you are not limited to these choices. You can type any arbitrary string at the confirmation prompt. The string you enter becomes the value associated with the "sc-lastchoice" key in the attribution alist.

Once an attribution string has been selected, Supercite will force the string to lower case if the variable sc-downcase-p is non-nil.

Two hook variables provide even greater control of the attribution selection process. The hook sc-attribs-preselect-hook is run before any attribution is selected. Likewise, the hook sc-attribs-postselect-hook is run after the attribution is selected (and the corresponding citation string is built), but before these values are committed for use by Supercite. During the post-selection hook, the local variables attribution and citation are bound to the appropriate strings. By changing these variables in your hook functions, you change the attribution and citation strings used by Supercite. One possible use of this would be to override any automatically derived attribution string when it is only one character long; e.g., you prefer to use "initials" but the author only has one name.

7.3 Author Names

Supercite employs a number of heuristics to decipher the author’s name based on value of the ‘From:’ mail field of the original message. Supercite can recognize almost all of the common ‘From:’ field formats in use. If you encounter a ‘From:’ field that Supercite cannot parse, please report this bug using M-x report-emacs-bug.

There are a number of Supercite variables that control how author names are extracted from the ‘From:’ header. Some headers may contain a descriptive title as in:

From: computer!speedy!doe (John Xavier-Doe -- Decent Hacker)

Supercite knows which part of the ‘From:’ header is email address and which part is author name, but in this case the string "Decent Hacker" is not part of the author’s name. You can tell Supercite to ignore the title, while still recognizing hyphenated names through the use of a regular expression in the variable sc-titlecue-regexp. This variable has the default value of "\\\\s +-+\\\\s +". Any text after this regexp is encountered is ignored as noise.

Some ‘From:’ headers may contain extra titles in the name fields not separated by a title cue, but which are nonetheless not part of the author’s name proper. Examples include the titles “Dr.”, “Mr.”, “Ms.”, “Jr.”, “Sr.”, and “III” (e.g., Thurston Howe, the Third). Also, some companies prepend or append the name of the division, organization, or project on the author’s name. All of these titles are noise which should be ignored. The variable sc-name-filter-alist is used for this purpose. As implied by its name, this variable is an association list, where each element is a cons cell of the form:

(regexp . position)

where regexp is a regular expression that is matched (using string-match) against each element of the ‘From:’ field’s author name. position is a position indicator, starting at zero. Thus to strip out all titles of “Dr.”, “Mr.”, etc. from the name, sc-name-filter-alist would have an entry such as:

("^\\(Mr\\|Mrs\\|Ms\\|Dr\\)[.]?$" . 0)

which only removes them if they appear as the first word in the name. The position indicator is an integer, or one of the two special symbols last or any. last always matches against the last word in the name field, while any matches against every word in the name field.

8.1 Using Regi

Regi works by interpreting frames with the function regi-interpret. A frame is a list of arbitrary size where each element is an entry of the following form:

(pred func [negate-p [case-fold-search]])

Regi starts with the first entry in a frame, evaluating the pred of that entry against the beginning of the line that ‘point’ is on. If the pred evaluates to true (or false if the optional negate-p is non-nil), then the func for that entry is evaluated. How processing continues is determined by the return value for func, and is described below. If pred was false the next entry in the frame is checked until all entries have been matched against the current line. If no entry matches, ‘point’ is moved forward one line and the frame is reset to the first entry.

pred can be a string, a variable, a list or one of the following symbols: t, begin, end, or every. If pred is a string, or a variable or list that evaluates to a string, it is interpreted as a regular expression. This regexp is matched against the current line, from the beginning, using looking-at. This match folds case if the optional case-fold-search is non-nil. If pred is not a string, or does not evaluate to a string, it is interpreted as a binary value (nil or non-nil).

The four special symbol values for pred are recognized:

t

Always produces a true outcome.

begin

Always executed before the frame is interpreted. This can be used to initialize some global variables for example.

end

Always executed after frame interpreting is completed. This can be used to perform any necessary post-processing.

every

Executes whenever the frame is reset, usually after the entire frame has been matched against the current line.

Note that negate-p and case-fold-search are ignored if pred is one of these special symbols. Only the first occurrence of each symbol in a frame is used; any duplicates are ignored. Also note that for performance reasons, the entries associated with these symbols are removed from the frame during the main interpreting loop.

Your func can return certain values which control continued Regi processing. By default, if your func returns nil (as it should be careful to do explicitly), Regi will reset the frame to the first entry, and advance ‘point’ to the beginning of the next line. If a list is returned from your function, it can contain any combination of the following elements:

the symbol continue

This tells Regi to continue processing entries after a match, instead of resetting the frame and moving ‘point’. In this way, lines of text can have multiple matches, but you have to be careful to avoid entering infinite loops.

the symbol abort

This tells Regi to terminate frame processing. However, any end entry is still processed.

the list (frame . newframe)

This tells Regi to substitute newframe as the frame it is interpreting. In other words, your func can modify the Regi frame on the fly. newframe can be a variable containing a frame, or it can be the frame in-lined.

the list (step . step)

Tells Regi to move step number of lines forward as it continues processing. By default, Regi moves forward one line. step can be zero or negative of course, but watch out for infinite loops.

During execution of your func, the following variables will be temporarily bound to some useful information:

curline

The current line in the buffer that Regi is looking-at, as a string.

curframe

The current frame being interpreted.

curentry

The current frame entry being interpreted.

8.2 Frames You Can Customize

As mentioned earlier, Supercite uses various frames to perform certain jobs such as mail header information extraction and mail header nuking. However, these frames are not available for you to customize, except through abstract interfaces such as sc-nuke-mail-header, et al.

However, the citation frames Supercite uses provide a lot of customizing power and are thus available to you to change to suit your needs. The workhorse of citation is the frame contained in the variable sc-default-cite-frame. This frame recognizes many situations, such as blank lines, which it interprets as paragraph separators. It also recognizes previously cited nested and non-nested citations in the original message. By default it will coerce non-nested citations into your preferred citation style, and it will add a level of citation to nested citations. It will also simply cite uncited lines in your preferred style.

In a similar vein, there are default frames for unciting and reciting, contained in the variables sc-default-uncite-frame and sc-default-recite-frame respectively.

As mentioned earlier (see Recognizing Citations), citations are recognized through the values of the regular expressions sc-citation-root-regexp, et al. To recognize odd styles, you could modify these variables, or you could modify the default citing frame. Alternatively, you could set up association lists of frames for recognizing specific alternative forms.

For each of the actions—citing, unciting, and reciting—an alist is consulted to find the frame to use (sc-cite-frame-alist, sc-uncite-frame-alist, and sc-recite-frame-alist respectively). These frames can contain alists of the form:

((infokey (regexp . frame) (regexp . frame) …)
 (infokey (regexp . frame) (regexp . frame) …)
 (…))

Where infokey is a key suitable for sc-mail-field, regexp is a regular expression which is string-match’d against the value of the sc-mail-field key, and frame is the frame to use if a match occurred. frame can be a variable containing a frame or a frame in-lined.

When Supercite is about to cite, uncite, or recite a region, it consults the appropriate alist and attempts to find a frame to use. If one is not found from the alist, then the appropriate default frame is used.

9.1 Commands to Manually Cite, Recite, and Uncite

Probably the three most common post-yank formatting operations that you will perform will be the manual citing, reciting, and unciting of regions of text in the reply buffer. Often you may want to recite a paragraph to use a nickname, or manually cite a message when setting sc-cite-region-limit to nil. The following commands perform these functions on the region of text between ‘point’ and ‘mark’. Each of them sets the undo boundary before modifying the region so that the command can be undone in the standard Emacs way.

Here is the list of Supercite citing commands:

sc-cite-region (C-c C-p c)

This command cites each line in the region of text by interpreting the selected frame from sc-cite-frame-alist, or the default citing frame sc-default-cite-frame. It runs the hook sc-pre-cite-hook before interpreting the frame. With an optional universal argument (C-u), it temporarily sets sc-confirm-always-p to t so you can confirm the attribution string for a single manual citing. See Configuring the Citation Engine.

sc-uncite-region (C-c C-p u)

This command removes any citation strings from the beginning of each cited line in the region by interpreting the selected frame from sc-uncite-frame-alist, or the default unciting frame sc-default-uncite-frame. It runs the hook sc-pre-uncite-hook before interpreting the frame. See Configuring the Citation Engine.

sc-recite-region (C-c C-p r)

This command recites each line the region by interpreting the selected frame from sc-recite-frame-alist, or the default reciting frame sc-default-recite-frame. It runs the hook sc-pre-recite-hook before interpreting the frame. See Configuring the Citation Engine.

Supercite will always ask you to confirm the attribution when reciting a region, regardless of the value of sc-confirm-always-p.

9.2 Insertion Commands

These two functions insert various strings into the reply buffer.

sc-insert-reference (C-c C-p w) ¶

Inserts a reference header into the reply buffer at ‘point’. With no arguments, the header indexed by sc-preferred-header-style is inserted. An optional numeric argument is the index into sc-rewrite-header-list indicating which reference header to write.

With just the universal argument (C-u), electric reference mode is entered, regardless of the value of sc-electric-references-p.

sc-insert-citation (C-c C-p i)

Inserts the current citation string at the beginning of the line that ‘point’ is on. If the line is already cited, Supercite will issue an error and will not cite the line.

9.3 Variable Toggling Shortcuts

Supercite defines a number of commands that make it easier for you to toggle and set various Supercite variables as you are editing the reply buffer. For example, you may want to turn off filling or whitespace cleanup, but only temporarily. These toggling shortcut commands make this easy to do.

Like Supercite commands in general, the toggling commands are placed on a keymap prefix within the greater Supercite keymap. For the default value of sc-mode-map-prefix, this will be C-c C-p C-t.

The following commands toggle the value of certain Supercite variables which take only a binary value:

C-c C-p C-t b

Toggles the variable sc-mail-nuke-blank-lines-p.

C-c C-p C-t c

Toggles the variable sc-confirm-always-p.

C-c C-p C-t d

Toggles the variable sc-downcase-p.

C-c C-p C-t e

Toggles the variable sc-electric-references-p.

C-c C-p C-t f

Toggles the variable sc-auto-fill-region-p.

C-c C-p C-t o

Toggles the variable sc-electric-circular-p.

C-c C-p C-t s

Toggles the variable sc-nested-citation-p.

C-c C-p C-t u

Toggles the variable sc-use-only-preferences-p.

C-c C-p C-t w

Toggles the variable sc-fixup-whitespace-p.

The following commands let you set the value of multi-value variables, in the same way that Emacs’s set-variable does:

C-c C-p C-t a

Sets the value of the variable sc-preferred-attribution-list.

C-c C-p C-t l

Sets the value of the variable sc-cite-region-limit.

C-c C-p C-t n

Sets the value of the variable sc-mail-nuke-mail-headers.

C-c C-p C-t N

Sets the value of the variable sc-mail-header-nuke-list.

C-c C-p C-t p

Sets the value of the variable sc-preferred-header-style.

One special command is provided to toggle both sc-auto-fill-region-p and sc-fixup-whitespace-p together. This is because you typically want to run Supercite with either variable as nil or non-nil. The command to toggle these variables together is bound on C-c C-p C-p.

Finally, the command C-c C-p C-t h (also C-c C-p C-t ?) brings up a Help message on the toggling keymap.

9.4 Mail Field Commands

These commands allow you to view, modify, add, and delete various bits of information from the info alist. See Information Keys and the Info Alist.

sc-mail-field-query (C-c C-p f)

Allows you to interactively view, modify, add, and delete info alist key-value pairs. With no argument, you are prompted (with completion) for an info key. The value associated with that key is displayed in the minibuffer. With an argument, this command will first ask if you want to view, modify, add, or delete an info key. Viewing is identical to running the command with no arguments.

If you want to modify the value of a key, Supercite will first prompt you (with completion) for the key of the value you want to change. It will then put you in the minibuffer with the key’s current value so you can edit the value as you wish. When you hit RET, the key’s value is changed. Minibuffer history is kept for the values.

If you choose to delete a key-value pair, Supercite will prompt you (with completion) for the key to delete.

If you choose to add a new key-value pair, Supercite firsts prompts you for the key to add. Note that completion is turned on for this prompt, but you can type any key name here, even one that does not yet exist. After entering the key, Supercite prompts you for the key’s value. It is not an error to enter a key that already exists, but the new value will override any old value. It will not replace it though; if you subsequently delete the key-value pair, the old value will reappear.

sc-mail-process-headers (C-c C-p g)

This command lets you re-initialize Supercite’s info alist from any set of mail headers in the region between ‘point’ and ‘mark’. This function is especially useful for replying to digest messages where Supercite will initially set up its information for the digest originator, but you want to cite each component article with the real message author. Note that unless an error during processing occurs, any old information is lost.

9.5 Miscellaneous Commands

sc-open-line (C-c C-p o)

Similar to Emacs’s standard open-line commands, but inserts the citation string in front of the new line. As with open-line, an optional numeric argument inserts that many new lines.