gnus-recent

Avoid having to open Gnus and find the right Group just to get back to that e-mail you were reading.

Or hit a key while reading one article to pop back through the stack of previously read articles, even if they were in a different Group.

Or insert a link to a recently read e-mail in an org-mode buffer by just picking one with completion:

Installation

If you use MELPA, you can just do M-x list-packages, find gnus-recent in the list and hit i x.

The Melpa packages doesn’t include the ivy/helm stuff, you’ll have to clone the repo if you want those.

Configuration

Require and bind whatever keys you prefer to the interactive function:

(use-package gnus-recent
  :ensure t  ; if you want it from MELPA
  ; :load-path "~/src/gnus-recent" ; if you're running from a git clone
  :demand t ; so that it's loaded after gnus even though we use :bind
  :after gnus
  :bind (("<f3>" . gnus-recent)
         :map gnus-summary-mode-map ("l" . gnus-recent-goto-previous)
         :map gnus-group-mode-map ("C-c L" . gnus-recent-goto-previous)))

If you use Embark, add the following to be able to insert org links on l:

(add-hook 'minibuffer-setup-hook #'gnus-recent-embark-minibuffer-hook)

Usage

After reading some articles in Gnus and then doing whatever, doing gnus-recent-goto-previous will open the last read article and rotate the list, so you can keep calling it to go further back.

Doing gnus-recent will let you pick an article to re-open.

If you use gnus-recent-ivy, you can hit M-o l to insert an org-mode link to the article instead.

Alternatives

• gnus-notes is a fork of gnus-recent which adds some more features (persistence, get a Helm list of Gnus links of the current Org subtree, etc.)
• The Gnus Registry might be persuaded to do gnus-recent’s job if you ask it nicely