[PATCH v5.2 7/7] emacs: Use the new JSON reply format and message-cite-original

[Adam Wolfe Gordon]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 22:59, Austin Clements <amdragon at mit.edu> wrote:
> I've been thinking about this more.  message-mode's default citation
> line is really unfortunate and quite possibly insane ("writes" isn't
> even the right tense and what's up with that extra line break?).  The
> option to change this is also well hidden (as an experiment, I tried
> navigating to it through customize and couldn't figure out where it
> was, even though I knew what I was looking for).  In general, I'm a
> fan of inheriting as many options from Emacs as possible, but people
> *are* going to ask how to change this and the default setting *is*
> going to turn people off of notmuch ("What mail client do you use that
> generates those quirky citation lines?"  "I use notmuch!"  "Is that,
> like, from the 80's?").

Agreed. It's a really unfortunate default.

> So, what about adding a notmuch customize option for selecting the
> citation line format?  It could offer a few const choices, including a
> default, sane format, plus the option to enter your own or to fall
> back to whatever message-mode is configured to do.  If we do this,
> it's probably best done in a follow-up series, but this seemed like an
> appropriate place to bring it up.

I think there are two options, which have been discussed a bit before [1]:

1) Wrap the citation format with a notmuch customization variable,
notmuch-citation-line-format or somesuch. Then set the
message-citation-line-format before calling message-cite-original.

2) Have notmuch load a user config file (~/.notmuch.el or something)
on startup, and provide a default file that sets nice defaults for
things like message-citation-line-format. The default file could even
be constructed on first run, such that if the user has already
customized some things (like message-citation-line-format) we can keep
their settings.

Option 2 is obviously more work, but I think it's the right way to go,
at least in the long run. In addition to giving a place to provide
nice defaults for non-notmuch variables, it gives the user a nice
place to specify notmuch-specific config. For example, I use
completely separate init files for notmuch and other emacs usage, and
having a notmuch config file would let me get away from this slightly
kludgey setup.

In either case, this can probably come as a separate patch series, but
it is good to start discussing it here.

[1] id:"m2mx9i3onw.fsf at wal122.wireless-pennnet.upenn.edu"