10.23 Various Various

gnus-home-directory

All Gnus file and directory variables will be initialized from this variable, which defaults to ~/.

gnus-directory

Most Gnus storage file and directory variables will be initialized from this variable, which defaults to the SAVEDIR environment variable, or ~/News/ if that variable isn’t set.

Note that Gnus is mostly loaded when the ~/.gnus.el file is read. This means that other directory variables that are initialized from this variable won’t be set properly if you set this variable in ~/.gnus.el. Set this variable in .emacs instead.

gnus-default-directory

Not related to the above variable at all—this variable says what the default directory of all Gnus buffers should be. If you issue commands like C-x C-f, the prompt you’ll get starts in the current buffer’s default directory. If this variable is nil (which is the default), the default directory will be the default directory of the buffer you were in when you started Gnus.

gnus-verbose

This variable is an integer between zero and ten. The higher the value, the more messages will be displayed. If this variable is zero, Gnus will never flash any messages, if it is seven (which is the default), most important messages will be shown, and if it is ten, Gnus won’t ever shut up, but will flash so many messages it will make your head swim.

gnus-verbose-backends

This variable works the same way as gnus-verbose, but it applies to the Gnus back ends instead of Gnus proper.

gnus-add-timestamp-to-message

This variable controls whether to add timestamps to messages that are controlled by gnus-verbose and gnus-verbose-backends and are issued. The default value is nil which means never to add timestamp. If it is log, add timestamps to only the messages that go into the *Messages* buffer. If it is neither nil nor log, add timestamps not only to log messages but also to the ones displayed in the echo area.

nnheader-max-head-length

When the back ends read straight heads of articles, they all try to read as little as possible. This variable (default 8192) specifies the absolute max length the back ends will try to read before giving up on finding a separator line between the head and the body. If this variable is nil, there is no upper read bound. If it is t, the back ends won’t try to read the articles piece by piece, but read the entire articles. This makes sense with some versions of ange-ftp.

nnheader-head-chop-length

This variable (default 2048) says how big a piece of each article to read when doing the operation described above.

nnheader-file-name-translation-alist

This is an alist that says how to translate characters in file names. For instance, if ‘:’ is invalid as a file character in file names on your system (you MS Windows user you), you could say something like:

(setq nnheader-file-name-translation-alist
      '((?: . ?_)))

In fact, this is (part of) the default value for this variable on MS Windows (phooey) systems.

gnus-hidden-properties

This is a list of properties to use to hide “invisible” text. It is (invisible t intangible t) by default on most systems, which makes invisible text invisible and intangible.

gnus-parse-headers-hook

A hook called before parsing headers. It can be used, for instance, to gather statistics on the headers fetched, or perhaps you’d like to prune some headers. I don’t see why you’d want that, though.

gnus-shell-command-separator

String used to separate two shell commands. The default is ‘;’.

gnus-invalid-group-regexp

Regexp to match “invalid” group names when querying user for a group name. The default value catches some really invalid group names who could possibly mess up Gnus internally (like allowing ‘:’ in a group name, which is normally used to delimit method and group).

IMAP users might want to allow ‘/’ in group names though.

gnus-safe-html-newsgroups

Groups in which links in html articles are considered all safe. The value may be a regexp matching those groups, a list of group names, or nil. This overrides mm-w3m-safe-url-regexp. The default value is "\\`nnrss[+:]". This is effective only when emacs-w3m renders html articles, i.e., in the case mm-text-html-renderer is set to w3m. See Display Customization in The Emacs MIME Manual.