validator via Pan-users posted on Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:15:44 +0000 as excerpted:
> I was wondering if there is a way to configure Pan to automatically open > and display the content of a message as soon as it is selected in the > headers panel. So I'll answer for both mouse selection, which I first assumed you wanted after the above paragraph, and keyboard, which the below paragraph makes clear you were actually asking about. They're both available but configured differently since the keyboard feature is partly covered by hotkey customization. > I've searched through the preferences and couldn't find such an option. > Specifically, I want to see the message preview immediately when I use > the arrow keys to navigate and select messages. Does this feature exist? For the mouse, preferences, behavior, mouse. There's two separate checkboxes for groups and articles. Checked a left-click activates (middle-click to select or use the usual ctrl/shift-click multi-select), unchecked it only selects. Keyboard is more complicated as there's actually several overlapping features involved. First, not quite what you wanted but since preferences, behavior may well be already opened for the mouse config above, verify the checkboxes under articles are all set according to your wishes, and while there you might as well do the same for all the other settings on that page as well. Now, what you're actually asking to hotkey-trigger is the appropriate items on the go menu, in particular, the next/previous-article or perhaps next-/unread/-article and /parent/-article. The existing hotkey settings should be listed beside them in the menu. But I've long since customized mine and don't remember what the defaults are. FWIW my settings (if viewing in pan you may want to toggle-wrap for each setting on its own line, "w" hotkey here and I believe default): next article: a previous article: shift-a (the common shift=reverse-function) next unread article: shift-ctrl-a parent article: shift-alt-a (Depending on your usage next-article and next-unread-article could be reversed; I wanted a plain a just doing next article so that's how I set it up.) (I have ctrl-a ingrained as select-all, so in pan it's select-article- body, with ctrl-alt-a the alternate function of that, select-all-articles in the header pane, and shift-ctrl-alt-a the reverse of that, deselecting them all.) So "a" hotkeys are article related (nice that select-all-articles and select-article-body are somewhat article related too, so they match both my ingrained and the article theme). Similarly, "t" hotkeys are thread related, and "g" hotkeys are group related. Pan's defaults sort of did some of this already, but the logic wasn't consistently applied enough for me so I customized. Before we actually discuss where/how to customize the hotkeys, though, I should mention that I'm a bit leery about assigning the (unmodified) arrow keys as hotkeys (if it's even possible, not sure), because I think it may have other navigation consequences. Assigning arrows to the next/previous (or next-unread/parent) article functions will presumably make them unavailable for other navigation, and I'm not sure that's what you want. You can of course experiment and see how it works, but I'd encourage you to either use the defaults or configure your own modified-letter-based hotkeys and let the (unmodified) arrow keys remain the generic navigation keys they normally are. Meanwhile, there's actually THREE (well, four...) ways to configure hotkeys, aka keyboard shortcuts, in pan, the new GUI way using the shortcuts page of preferences, editing the pan.hotkeys file directly, or editing the old accels.txt file that (I think) pan still reads/writes for backward compatibility. If you use the GUI, restart pan immediately after you're done customizing to ensure the two files are updated correctly, as pan doesn't write out some settings until it shuts down and I'm not sure whether shortcuts are among settings only-written-at-shutdown or not. If you edit the pan.hotkeys file directly, pay attention to the instruction comments within, and of course edit it with pan not running so it can load the new settings when it starts up. Accels.txt is for backward compatibility and isn't something I'd recommend editing manually but it used to be the only way. If you open it in a text editor I think you'll see why a new solution was needed. (It's basically just a to-humans-unordered dump.) Early gtk and pan trivia: Back in the late gtk 1 and/or early gtk 2 era when accels.txt was the only pan hotkey storage file and the shortcuts prefs page didn't exist yet, gtk menu hotkeys weren't /really/ supposed to be configurable at all at the gtk level. So the "gui configuration method" to configure hotkeys for /any/ gtk app involved first manually adding some obscure non-default setting to some gtk config file to allow the gtk menus to be hotkey-configured, and of course for it to be remembered for the next run the app had to dump an accels file at shutdown and load it at startup, too, which most apps didn't but pan did. Then you'd restart pan (or whatever other gtk app) to pick than up, after which you could mouse-hover over a menu entry and hit the desired new hotkey -- which worked unless it didn't. The problem was that it didn't work for any of the menu accelerator keys that were pre-configured to move to a different entry on the open menu (the "underlined keys" in the menu entries) as they'd do that instead of being picked up as the new hotkey, and as it involved text-editing that obscure gtk setting in any case, which of course you had to know about first, most customizers just text- edited accels.txt despite the difficulties. Of course that meant that you *really* had to want to customize things before you'd bother (with either method), but it was there for those like me that wanted it bad enough. Then of course there's the /other/ method, both then and now: grab the pan sources and patch them to make the defaults what you want, and rebuild pan, much like I did recently for pan's color customization when that was broken. That works... if you're determined enough to make it worth the trouble. (Tho for me as a gentooer that's not the hurdle it would be for most, as I already build most everything from source so the tools and library include files are all there already, as is the machinery to routinely reapply local patches on every update.) -- 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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
