Re: mail-mode: colors in multiply-quoted lines

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I'm using mail-mode to compose messages, using Mutt for the actual
> mailing. That is, I'm only interested in the composition features (good
> handling of reformatting quoted paragraphs, signatures, etc.), I don't
> care about the actual sending of messages, so message-mode isn't
> relevant to me if the only real difference is in the ability to add MIME
> attachments and so forth.

I recommend you try and use message-mode rather than mail-mode (the
differences should be minor, other than the new features like MIME
handling).
But I don't think that will make a difference to your problem.

To get this kind of multiple-quoting highlighting, you could do
something like:

  (add-hook 'message-mode-hook
            (lambda ()
              (font-lock-add-keywords nil
                '(("^[ \t]*>[ \t\f]*>.*$" (0 'foo-face)))))

where `foo-face' is the face you'd like to use for such quoting.

> mail-mode seems only to colorize all quoted text, i.e. it doesn't color
> text differently depending on the level of quoting. Is there any way to
> get this functionality?

Not currently, no.

> In the Mutt pager, for example you can specify four different colors
> for different levels of quoting; it would be nice to get this when
> I go into the message in Emacs too.

Gnus does it when displaying messages, but not when editing them.
Bringing the two closer to each other would be good.

> I've had a look at post-mode, which does do this, but it seems to be not
> widely used or supported. Is it considered a well-done mode?

I have no idea.


        Stefan