Gnus: Hiding Future Thread Posts (publ. 2024-12-18)

Often in mailing lists there are threads that I am not interested in. One can kill a whole thread with gnus-summary-kill-same-subject (C-k) or some other similar commands. But then the next time you login, you might see new posts on that the thread which you then have to kill.

The recommended way of dealing with this in Gnus is the scoring mechanism. You can drop a thread subject to a very low score (tied to a particular group, i.e., mailing list) and then Gnus will automatically mark it read. You will see the messages initially, but they will be marked with the gnus-low-score-mark (Y) and will be hidden next time you view the group, or you run gnus-summary-limit-to-unread (x). The core function involved is gnus-summary-lower-score (L).

A problem here is that gnus-summary-lower-score has lots of options, and it takes around four key presses in a menu down in the echo area to get through all the options. But this little macro does what I want, with a single character key-binding. I picked "C-;" and set it up to activate only in a Gnus Summary buffer.

(defalias 'gnus-summary-score-down-subject-temp
   (kmacro "L s e t <return>"))

(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (keymap-set gnus-summary-mode-map "C-;"
                             'gnus-summary-score-down-subject-temp)))

That macro chooses exact subject match, which I felt was safer, but it means you might sometimes need to use it more than once on a thread, as it distinguishes between a thread subject with and without the "RE:" added. The different options for gnus-summary-lower-score are documented in the Gnus info manual if you want to adjust this approach.

Copyright

CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed