3.7 Marking Articles

There are several marks you can set on an article.

You have marks that decide the readedness (whoo, neato-keano neologism ohoy!) of the article. Alphabetic marks generally mean read, while non-alphabetic characters generally mean unread.

In addition, you also have marks that do not affect readedness.

There’s a plethora of commands for manipulating these marks.

3.7.1 Unread Articles

The following marks mark articles as (kinda) unread, in one form or other.

‘!’

Marked as ticked (gnus-ticked-mark).

Ticked articles are articles that will remain visible always. If you see an article that you find interesting, or you want to put off reading it, or replying to it, until sometime later, you’d typically tick it. However, articles can be expired (from news servers by the news server software, Gnus itself never expires ticked messages), so if you want to keep an article forever, you’ll have to make it persistent (see section Persistent Articles).

‘?’

Marked as dormant (gnus-dormant-mark).

Dormant articles will only appear in the summary buffer if there are followups to it. If you want to see them even if they don’t have followups, you can use the / D command (see section Limiting). Otherwise (except for the visibility issue), they are just like ticked messages.

‘SPACE’

Marked as unread (gnus-unread-mark).

Unread articles are articles that haven’t been read at all yet.

3.7.2 Read Articles

All the following marks mark articles as read.

‘r’

These are articles that the user has marked as read with the d command manually, more or less (gnus-del-mark).

‘R’

Articles that have actually been read (gnus-read-mark).

‘O’

Articles that were marked as read in previous sessions and are now old (gnus-ancient-mark).

‘K’

Marked as killed (gnus-killed-mark).

‘X’

Marked as killed by kill files (gnus-kill-file-mark).

‘Y’

Marked as read by having too low a score (gnus-low-score-mark).

‘C’

Marked as read by a catchup (gnus-catchup-mark).

‘G’

Canceled article (gnus-canceled-mark)

‘Q’

Sparsely reffed article (gnus-sparse-mark). See section Customizing Threading.

‘M’

Article marked as read by duplicate suppression (gnus-duplicate-mark). See section Duplicate Suppression.

All these marks just mean that the article is marked as read, really. They are interpreted differently when doing adaptive scoring, though.

One more special mark, though:

‘E’

Marked as expirable (gnus-expirable-mark).

Marking articles as expirable (or have them marked as such automatically) doesn’t make much sense in normal groups—a user doesn’t control expiring of news articles, but in mail groups, for instance, articles marked as expirable can be deleted by Gnus at any time.

3.7.3 Other Marks

There are some marks that have nothing to do with whether the article is read or not.

• You can set a bookmark in the current article. Say you are reading a long thesis on cats’ urinary tracts, and have to go home for dinner before you’ve finished reading the thesis. You can then set a bookmark in the article, and Gnus will jump to this bookmark the next time it encounters the article. See section Setting Marks.
• All articles that you have replied to or made a followup to (i.e., have answered) will be marked with an ‘A’ in the second column (gnus-replied-mark).
• All articles that you have forwarded will be marked with an ‘F’ in the second column (gnus-forwarded-mark).
• Articles stored in the article cache will be marked with an ‘*’ in the second column (gnus-cached-mark). See section Article Caching.
• Articles “saved” (in some manner or other; not necessarily religiously) are marked with an ‘S’ in the second column (gnus-saved-mark).
• Articles that haven’t been seen before in Gnus by the user are marked with a ‘.’ in the second column (gnus-unseen-mark).
• When using the Gnus agent (see section Agent Basics), articles may be downloaded for unplugged (offline) viewing. If you are using the ‘%O’ spec, these articles get the ‘+’ mark in that spec. (The variable gnus-downloaded-mark controls which character to use.)
• When using the Gnus agent (see section Agent Basics), some articles might not have been downloaded. Such articles cannot be viewed while you are unplugged (offline). If you are using the ‘%O’ spec, these articles get the ‘-’ mark in that spec. (The variable gnus-undownloaded-mark controls which character to use.)
• The Gnus agent (see section Agent Basics) downloads some articles automatically, but it is also possible to explicitly mark articles for download, even if they would not be downloaded automatically. Such explicitly-marked articles get the ‘%’ mark in the first column. (The variable gnus-downloadable-mark controls which character to use.)
• If the ‘%e’ spec is used, the presence of threads or not will be marked with gnus-not-empty-thread-mark and gnus-empty-thread-mark in the third column, respectively.
• Finally we have the process mark (gnus-process-mark). A variety of commands react to the presence of the process mark. For instance, X u (gnus-uu-decode-uu) will uudecode and view all articles that have been marked with the process mark. Articles marked with the process mark have a ‘#’ in the second column.

You might have noticed that most of these “non-readedness” marks appear in the second column by default. So if you have a cached, saved, replied article that you have process-marked, what will that look like?

Nothing much. The precedence rules go as follows: process -> cache -> replied -> saved. So if the article is in the cache and is replied, you’ll only see the cache mark and not the replied mark.

3.7.4 Setting Marks

All the marking commands understand the numeric prefix.

M c

M-u

Clear all readedness-marks from the current article (gnus-summary-clear-mark-forward). In other words, mark the article as unread.

M t

!

Tick the current article (gnus-summary-tick-article-forward). See section Article Caching.

M ?

?

Mark the current article as dormant (gnus-summary-mark-as-dormant). See section Article Caching.

M d

d

Mark the current article as read (gnus-summary-mark-as-read-forward).

D

Mark the current article as read and move point to the previous line (gnus-summary-mark-as-read-backward).

M k

k

Mark all articles that have the same subject as the current one as read, and then select the next unread article (gnus-summary-kill-same-subject-and-select).

M K

C-k

Mark all articles that have the same subject as the current one as read (gnus-summary-kill-same-subject).

M C

Mark all unread articles as read (gnus-summary-catchup).

M C-c

Mark all articles in the group as read—even the ticked and dormant articles (gnus-summary-catchup-all).

M H

Catchup the current group to point (before the point) (gnus-summary-catchup-to-here).

M h

Catchup the current group from point (after the point) (gnus-summary-catchup-from-here).

C-w

Mark all articles between point and mark as read (gnus-summary-mark-region-as-read).

M V k

Kill all articles with scores below the default score (or below the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-kill-below).

M e

E

Mark the current article as expirable (gnus-summary-mark-as-expirable).

M b

Set a bookmark in the current article (gnus-summary-set-bookmark).

M B

Remove the bookmark from the current article (gnus-summary-remove-bookmark).

M V c

Clear all marks from articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-clear-above).

M V u

Tick all articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) (gnus-summary-tick-above).

M V m

Prompt for a mark, and mark all articles with scores over the default score (or over the numeric prefix) with this mark (gnus-summary-clear-above).

The gnus-summary-goto-unread variable controls what action should be taken after setting a mark. If non-nil, point will move to the next/previous unread article. If nil, point will just move one line up or down. As a special case, if this variable is never, all the marking commands as well as other commands (like SPACE) will move to the next article, whether it is unread or not. The default is t.

3.7.5 Generic Marking Commands

Some people would like the command that ticks an article (!) to go to the next article. Others would like it to go to the next unread article. Yet others would like it to stay on the current article. And even though I haven’t heard of anybody wanting it to go to the previous (unread) article, I’m sure there are people that want that as well.

Multiply these five behaviors with five different marking commands, and you get a potentially complex set of variable to control what each command should do.

To sidestep that mess, Gnus provides commands that do all these different things. They can be found on the M M map in the summary buffer. Type M M C-h to see them all—there are too many of them to list in this manual.

While you can use these commands directly, most users would prefer altering the summary mode keymap. For instance, if you would like the ! command to go to the next article instead of the next unread article, you could say something like:

(add-hook 'gnus-summary-mode-hook 'my-alter-summary-map)
(defun my-alter-summary-map ()
  (local-set-key "!" 'gnus-summary-put-mark-as-ticked-next))

or

(defun my-alter-summary-map ()
  (local-set-key "!" "MM!n"))

3.7.6 Setting Process Marks

Process marks are displayed as # in the summary buffer, and are used for marking articles in such a way that other commands will process these articles. For instance, if you process mark four articles and then use the * command, Gnus will enter these four articles into the cache. For more information, see section Process/Prefix.

M P p

#

Mark the current article with the process mark (gnus-summary-mark-as-processable).

M P u

M-#

Remove the process mark, if any, from the current article (gnus-summary-unmark-as-processable).

M P U

Remove the process mark from all articles (gnus-summary-unmark-all-processable).

M P i

Invert the list of process marked articles (gnus-uu-invert-processable).

M P R

Mark articles that have a Subject header that matches a regular expression (gnus-uu-mark-by-regexp).

M P G

Unmark articles that have a Subject header that matches a regular expression (gnus-uu-unmark-by-regexp).

M P r

Mark articles in region (gnus-uu-mark-region).

M P g

Unmark articles in region (gnus-uu-unmark-region).

M P t

Mark all articles in the current (sub)thread (gnus-uu-mark-thread).

M P T

Unmark all articles in the current (sub)thread (gnus-uu-unmark-thread).

M P v

Mark all articles that have a score above the prefix argument (gnus-uu-mark-over).

M P s

Mark all articles in the current series (gnus-uu-mark-series).

M P S

Mark all series that have already had some articles marked (gnus-uu-mark-sparse).

M P a

Mark all articles in series order (gnus-uu-mark-all).

M P b

Mark all articles in the buffer in the order they appear (gnus-uu-mark-buffer).

M P k

Push the current process mark set onto the stack and unmark all articles (gnus-summary-kill-process-mark).

M P y

Pop the previous process mark set from the stack and restore it (gnus-summary-yank-process-mark).

M P w

Push the current process mark set onto the stack (gnus-summary-save-process-mark).

Also see the & command in Searching for Articles, for how to set process marks based on article body contents.

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