gnus viewer for attachments

Question

I recently started using gnus to view my emails. Opening attachments is still the most annoying part for me and I am trying to address that.

The behaviour I would like is: If the attachment is text-based then open in an emacs buffer in the same instance I am using, otherwise open using the system's xdg-open.

According to emacswiki, I created a file ~/.mailcap with the single line

    application/*; xdg-open %s

But then this line is just added to the application list in /etc/mailcap, which I have no control over, and I have to select xdg-open in the list that is shown to me every time I try to open an attachment. How can I prevent gnus from reading that file and instead directly open an attachment with xdg-open?

Also, how do I get text files to open in a buffer?

Finally, is there a way to open the attachment without going all the way to the file name in the email? Perhaps by showing a list of attachment and letting me choose one of them?

Answer 1

So many questions at once.

• emacs-27 will prefer ~/.mailcap entries to the system ones. See Mailcap precedence for details. You can build the emacs master branch from source to pick up those changes.

• The answer to your third question is: Check out the K- bindings in the Summary buffer:

    K C             gnus-article-view-part-as-charset
    K E             gnus-article-encrypt-body
    K H             gnus-article-browse-html-article
    K O             gnus-article-save-part-and-strip
    K b             gnus-summary-display-buttonized
    K c             gnus-article-copy-part
    K d             gnus-article-delete-part
    K e             gnus-article-view-part-externally
    K i             gnus-article-inline-part
    K j             gnus-article-jump-to-part
    K m             gnus-summary-repair-multipart
    K o             gnus-article-save-part
    K r             gnus-article-replace-part
    K t             gnus-article-view-part-as-type
    K v             gnus-article-view-part
    K |             gnus-article-pipe-part

(they all take numerical prefix arguments to specify which part you're talking about)

• For youre second question, you're looking for the unfortunately-named gnus-article-copy-part, which will create a buffer containing that part.