alex chiang: web 6.0

I’ve seen numerous posts in news.software.readers asking how to change your From: line (in slrn), or your signature (or whatever) depending on what newsgroup you’re reading. The answer is usually a bit of s-lang macro that is an article hook or group hook. To this, I say “feh”.

Do yourself a favor and go get identity.sl. It will let you change almost anything you want based on the newsgroup, and it’s much easier to understand and use.

The last lines of my slrn rc file now read:

interpret ".identity.sl"
interpret ".achiang-identity.sl"

Inside .achiang-identity.sl is the following:

identity->add_new("hp", "^hp\.");
identity->set_from("hp", "alex", "hp.com");
identity->set_real("hp", "Alex Chiang");

identity->add_new("rc", "^rec\.");
identity->set_from("rc", "alex", "none.invalid");
identity->set_real("rc", "Alex Chiang");
identity->set_replyto("rc", "alex@chizang.net");

So for the hp.* hierarchy, I use my naked email address. In rec.*, I set my From: line to an invalid domain (note the .invalid, which is how you are supposed to indicate a junk domain), and set my reply-to correctly.

This solves the problem perfectly, and I don’t have to muck around with s-lang.