[Pan-users] Re: Changing the Save Article behavior for text only messages.

[Duncan]

Eric Tompkins <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Mon,
26 Jan 2009 01:50:52 +0000:

> Is there any way to get the current release of Pan to use the Subject as
> the filename when saving text only messages, instead of the Message ID.
> The old Pan did this, and it worked great for text only groups. When
> reading / saving several posts, trying to figure out the subject later
> involves reading each one. Not very fast.

AFAIK, no, there's no way to save with the subject as the name, not 
directly from the GUI, as shipped anyway.  There are however several 
possible workarounds that may work for you... with the caveat that most 
of them use the followup mechanism so you end up with quoted text, not a 
direct copy of the message.  You can still get the full message including 
headers (quoted, however), if you toggle headers on in pan, then select 
the full message (or whatever bit you want) before hitting followup to 
open the message editor dialog.

What I do, as I've preferred to keep the text messages I want to keep in 
one place, my mail client, anyway, is use it.  If you've had occasion to 
try forwarding or replying off-list via mail, you'll have noted that 
(provided you have mail configured to do so) pan now simply hands off to 
your mail client instead of handling mail itself.  What's more, it 
detects whether to mail or to reply via news (or both) by whether the 
mailto or newsgroups line is filled in.

Thus, it's real easy to send your mail client a copy of the message 
text.  Simply hit any of the followup or mail buttons/hotkeys (I always 
use the default "f"/followup hotkey, due to years of "muscle memory"), 
delete what's in the newsgroups line if necessary, put any old thing (a 
single letter is fine) in the mailto, and hit send.  Provided you have 
pan configured correctly for your mail client, it will open in that, and 
you can do what you wish (forward it, save it as a mail message, etc) 
from there.  If you have a decent mail client it works quite well, with 
the quote-caveat above.

There are two other alternatives also using the message editor dialog.  
One, use the "draft" feature pan has now.  That gives you a conventional 
save-as dialog and you can name it whatever you want.  Of course you 
still have that quote-caveat since you're going thru the message editor 
window.

Two, use the external editor feature.  That actually gives you a 
reasonable amount of flexibility, depending on what you setup as your 
"external editor" (hint, it does NOT have to be a real "editor", it can 
be a shell script or whatever).  If you use a text editor, you can of 
course use its save dialog or do whatever else you might do with an 
ordinary text file.  Instead of an editor, I actually invoke a script 
here that I can use to attach UUE encoded binaries to the message with, 
giving me a way to post binary attachments using pan! =:^)  (I won't 
bother detailing it in this reply but ask about it if you want.)  You 
could obviously do something similar with a message-saver script of some 
sort, but you're still working with no headers unless selected, and the 
quote-caveat above.

Talking about scripts, as you ask below about sources, I imagine you can 
handle scripting as well (or make a C/C++ executable to do it if you 
wish).  It should be reasonably simple to create a script that takes a 
the existing message-id filename as a parameter, does a grep for the 
subject header, and renames the file accordingly.  You could even get 
fancy and associate the script with *.msg files in your file manager of 
choice, so clicking on them "magically" renames them by subject! =:^)  As 
should be obvious from the script I mentioned in the above paragraph, 
I've gotten creative with scripting myself, so have a decent idea what it 
takes.

> If it cant be changed in a configuration file, could it be changed in
> the source and a new binary built from that?

Of course.  With the sources you can do anything! =:^)  It's even quite 
likely Charles would take a patch if you submit one, tho he hasn't been 
working much with pan lately so it might be awhile before it got merged.  
If you do create such a patch, please attach it to a bug and post the 
link to it here, as I'd love to have it too, and I'm already running the 
Gentoo "live-svn" pan ebuild (which I helped create, BTW) and routinely 
apply various patches.  Unfortunately I'm not a C++ coder myself so I 
can't create my own, =:^( or there'd be several more I'd have submitted 
and be applying if they weren't yet merged. 

The catch is that as pan uses the message-id for its cache files, I 
expect it's using the same mechanism (or simply copying the cached file) 
to save the message as text.  That being the case, making available the 
subject as filename option might be more complex than it would look 
initially as that data might not be exposed to the message-as-text-saver 
functionality as currently implemented.

> Would this be better asked in gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.devel ?

I'd personally post follow-up questions there if you decide to try it, 
just to keep the non-dev users from having to read the real technical 
stuff, but the question was fine here, too, as will be followups if you 
prefer.  We're not as strict about keeping developer threads off user as 
some lists might be, and the devel list tends to be very low traffic.  
Whichever list you wish will be just fine.  If you decide to code up a 
patch, however, posting the bug link here is useful, as there are likely 
folks here willing/wanting to test that aren't subscribed there as they 
can't code.  (I can't either, but find dev discussions interesting enough 
that I'm subscribed there anyway, but as I said, it's low traffic.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman