Composing Mail Blind: Which Mode, Basic Tweaking Qs?

Composing Mail Blind: Which Mode, Basic Tweaking Qs?

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

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Hi, I'm a legally blind programmer new to Emacs and Linux but greatly fond 
of the editor already. I'd hope to be able to use Emacs to efficiently 
quote, navigate and snip bottom-posted stuff much better than, say, Gedit 
let's me. Three features, abstractly put, would make Emacs win other editors 
hands down:

1. Sequentially get to the first line of the next/prev quote at level n (1 
and 0 at least)
2. Snip in the current subtree of quote levels: trim to selection or kill 
from/to cursor
3. Re-quote snipped text on the fly maintaining maximum line length and 
minimizing line count

To clarify, level 0 text is what i'm typing, level 1 has an instance of the 
quote prefix etc. The subtree is a descending series of quote levels bound 
by level 0 text or an increase in quote level, starting another sub tree.

My question is, which Emacs mode would be closest to what I'm after? If 
there's nothing quite like that, is it possible to customize it well enough 
by changing regexpes, doing some macos and a bit of regexp searching? 
Generaly, where can I get info on how to slightly customize a major mode 
without getting into Elisp properly?

Those were my  questions, now some rationale (feel free to skip and snip in 
a hurry):
Using Emacs with speechd-el means I listen to the computer at an extremely 
fast speech rate (the whole usenet is spoken). Nevertheless, it does mean 
there's no way to glance around, get the big picture or compare things 
easily, in stead navigation in textual units, by regexp or linearly reading 
through stuff, is the way to go. In the context of e-mail it means finding 
the next level 1 quote is a linear thing for most blind folks. That is, 
cursor the unquoted post until you don't hear greater than, greedily 
interrupting the speech as soon as you know the relevance of the current 
line e.g. greater ... greater ... gr .... gr ... gr ... somthing else. Then 
requote the line you refer to.

What I tend to do in editors working like cua-mode is to cursor quotedd text 
shift down until I hear the desired line or see the quote prefix heavily 
magnified. then it is a matter of killing the selection, snipping the quote, 
and manually rewrapping and adding new quote signs as needed.  This is a 
silly manual process that would be easy to automate. Magnifying the problem, 
I tend to snip loads, mostly including stuff mid sentence and almost never 
quoting more than five lines per comment. Maybe this is about speech being 
still slower than sight, even though I've listened to this synth (Orpheus US 
English) for 10 years now.

Another problem are the quote signs, hearing "greater than" as an artifact 
of logical, visual line breaks. WIth fellow blind folks I use a unique 
letter from the first name at the very beginning of a  quote e.g. V: for me 
with V2: and V3: referring to earlier comments. If there's a mode letting me 
switch quoting between different styles on the fly, that would solve the 
thing neatly.

As for why I'm not keen on lisp, the syntax is horribly regularly 
irritating, <smile>. It is very hard to parse mentally when spoken, compared 
to clean languages like Lua or Ruby, AppleScript and SQL being the extreme 
examples here. Code such as:

(while (< (point) end)
  (re-search-forward "\\w+\\W*")

becomes spoken by line:

left paren while left paren less than left paren point right paren end right 
paren  and so on

Mental stack overflown. Syntax and bracket highlighting is generally no 
good. But the reader understanding what it reads, in evaluation order, might 
be.

In Lua it could be:

while point() < End() do

True I did learn regexp, but they help me loads daily, I think all blind 
folks should know them. I even learned Perl but I've realized I should have 
learned Ruby as far as syntax goes. Nough said.  Maybe I should still try to 
learn Elisp considering how much Emacs has helped me, I posted about this 
recently in alt.comp.blind-users.

Anyway, any help appreciated. I've read the Emacs FAQ, the Wiki, Learning 
Emacs, asked around, Googled, read Emacs, Rmail, Gnus etf... manuals etc... 
None of them talk very much about composing e-mail, oddly enough. Maybe 
there isn't much special support.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä
Accessibility, Apps and Coding plus Synths and Music:
http://vtatila.kapsi.fi