10.3 Customizing the chat buffer

You can customize the look of the prompts in the chat buffer. There are separate settings for local (i.e. your own messages) and foreign prompts.

jabber-chat-prompt-local and jabber-chat-prompt-foreign determine the faces used for the prompts.

jabber-chat-local-prompt-format and jabber-chat-foreign-prompt-format determine what text is displayed in the prompts. They are format strings, with the following special sequences defined:

%t

The time when the message was sent or received

%n

The nickname of the user. For the foreign prompt, this is the name of the contact in the roster, or the JID if no name set. For the local prompt, this is the username part of your JID.

%j

The bare JID of the user

jabber-chat-time-format defines how %t shows time. Its format is identical to that passed to format-time-string. See Time Conversion (GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual).

You can also customize the header line of chat buffers, by modifying the variable jabber-chat-header-line-format. The format of that variable is the same as that of mode-line-format and header-line-format. See Mode-Line Format (GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual).