Templates

Three pieces of text mrman produces are templated, with embedded defaults you can replace:

Template	Renders
notes	The export from y, :clip, :export and --stdout
review_body	The body posted with :submit
patch_reply	The mail reply from :patch when reviewing a patch series

[templates]
notes = "~/.config/mrman/templates/notes.md.tmpl"
review_body = "~/.config/mrman/templates/review_body.md.tmpl"
patch_reply = "~/.config/mrman/templates/patch_reply.txt.tmpl"

All three are Go text/template. A template that fails to parse falls back to its default with a warning rather than losing your review — an export is not the place to discover a syntax error.

The notes template

Data model

Every exported field and method below is stable; overrides may rely on them.

Top level

Field	Type	Meaning
.Slug	string	Session slug, empty when the session has none
.Repo	string	Repository path
.Branch	string	Branch name, empty on a detached head
.DiffSourceLabel	string	Human scope description, e.g. staged changes
.ScopeLine	string	The full Reviewing … line; empty for working-tree reviews
.SessionNotes	string	Session summary, empty when unset
.CommentTypes	[]LegendEntry	Legend entries for types actually used
.ShowLegend	bool	Gated by export_legend
.ReviewComments	[]TemplateComment	Review-level comments, numbered first
.Files	[]TemplateFile	Files carrying comments, sorted by path
.Counts	struct	.Files, .Reviewed, .Comments totals

LegendEntry — .ID, .Label, .Definition (falls back to ID).

TemplateFile — .Path, .Status (added, modified, …), .Comments (file-level first, then line comments by line).

TemplateComment

Field	Meaning
.Type	Uppercased export label (ISSUE); empty for untyped
.Author	Comment author (user for local drafts)
.ShowAuthor	Whether .Author should be badged for this reader — see below
.Location	The anchor without backticks — see below
.CommitID	Short SHA the comment is scoped to, empty when unscoped
.Content	Raw comment text, may span lines
.Anchor	The anchor as the diff parser saw it (path:line or path:start-end), for templates that quote hunks
.Number	Continuous 1-based sequence across the whole export
.Diff	Unified-diff text of the hunk the comment is anchored in, unfenced; empty unless export_diff is on — see below
.Marker	Method: the numbered-list marker, e.g. 3.
.Body	Method: .Content with continuation lines indented under the marker
.DiffBlock	Method: .Diff as a fenced block with its own surrounding blank lines, or empty
.AuthorTag	Method: @name, or empty when the comment is not badged
.Tag	Method: the bracket contents — .Type, .AuthorTag, or both joined by a space

.Location formats:

Shape	Means
src/x.go:42	A line on the new side
src/x.go:~42	A line on the old (deleted) side
src/x.go:10-15	A range on the new side
src/x.go:~10-~15	A range on the old side
src/x.go	A file comment
Review Comment (scope: …)	A review-level comment

Prefer .Body over .Content in a numbered list — it handles multi-line comments and strips stray carriage returns. .Content is there when you are building something other than a list.

The author badge

.Tag is what the default template brackets, so a review written by more than one person exports as **[ISSUE @claude]** and an untyped comment as **[@claude]**. Use .Tag rather than .Type unless you want to drop attribution.

Which comments carry a badge follows the same rule the TUI draws by:

• Your own comments are bare — the badge marks what someone else wrote. Set show_own_author = true to attribute every comment instead.
• A comment with no author is never badged. That is a session written before mrman stamped authors, and inventing one would be a guess.
• With no username configured, nothing matches you, so every comment badges as @user. Setting username is what quiets that.

.ShowAuthor is the resolved verdict, already folded into .AuthorTag and .Tag; read it directly only if you are rendering the badge some other way.

Quoted hunks

With export_diff = true, every line-anchored comment carries the hunk it sits in. .Diff is the raw text — the @@ header, then the hunk’s lines with their +/- prefixes — and .DiffBlock is that same text fenced and spaced ready to drop straight above a list entry, which is what the default does.

Both are empty when there is nothing to quote: review and file comments are not anchored to a hunk, and neither are comments on a binary file, an oversized one, a file the current diff no longer carries, or a line that has since gone. A run of comments inside one hunk quotes it once, on the first of them.

Use .DiffBlock unless you are placing the fence yourself:

{{range .Comments}}{{if .Diff}}{{codefence "diff" .Diff}}
{{end}}- {{.Location}}: {{.Content}}
{{end}}

codefence widens the fence past any backtick run in the diff, so a hunk that itself contains a code fence cannot break out of the block.

Helper functions

Function	Use
upper	{{upper .Type}}
trunc	{{trunc 80 .Content}} — at most N runes
indent	{{indent 2 .Content}}
join	{{join ", " .Names}}
codefence	Wraps text in a fence sized to avoid collisions

The default

Worth reading before you replace it — it defines an entry template and reuses it for both review-level and per-file comments:

{{define "entry"}}{{.DiffBlock}}{{.Marker}} {{if .Tag}}**[{{.Tag}}]** {{end}}`{{.Location}}`{{if .CommitID}} (commit {{.CommitID}}){{end}} - {{.Body}}
{{end}}{{if .Slug}}## Session: {{.Slug}}

{{end}}I reviewed your code and have the following comments. Please address them.

{{if .ScopeLine}}{{.ScopeLine}}

{{end}}{{if and .ShowLegend .CommentTypes}}Comment types: {{range $i, $t := .CommentTypes}}{{if $i}}, {{end}}{{upper $t.Label}} ({{$t.Definition}}){{end}}

{{end}}{{if .SessionNotes}}Summary: {{.SessionNotes}}

{{end}}{{if or .ReviewComments .Files}}## Local mrman Comments

{{range .ReviewComments}}{{template "entry" .}}{{end}}{{range .Files}}{{range .Comments}}{{template "entry" .}}{{end}}{{end}}{{end}}

A worked override

Group by file with headings instead of one flat list:

# Review: {{.Repo}}{{if .Branch}} ({{.Branch}}){{end}}

{{.Counts.Comments}} comment(s) across {{.Counts.Files}} file(s); {{.Counts.Reviewed}} reviewed.

{{range .ReviewComments}}> {{.Content}}
{{end}}
{{range .Files}}## `{{.Path}}` — {{.Status}}

{{range .Comments}}- {{if .Type}}**{{.Type}}** {{end}}`{{.Location}}` — {{.Content}}
{{end}}
{{end}}

The review-body template

This one is deliberately small, because it is posted to a forge rather than read locally.

Field	Meaning
.ReviewComments	Review-level comments
.MovedToSummary	Comments that could not be anchored inline

Each carries .Type (empty when untyped), .Path (set on MovedToSummary items), .Content, .Author/.ShowAuthor, and the .AuthorTag/.Tag methods described above. upper is available — .Tag uppercases the type for you.

The default:

{{- range $i, $c := .ReviewComments}}{{if $i}}

{{end}}{{if $c.AuthorTag}}**[{{$c.AuthorTag}}]** {{end}}{{$c.Content}}{{end}}
{{- if .MovedToSummary}}{{if .ReviewComments}}

{{end}}## Unplaced comments

{{range .MovedToSummary}}- {{if .Tag}}[{{.Tag}}] {{end}}{{.Path}}: {{.Content}}
{{end}}{{end}}

This body is posted to a forge, where @name may resolve to a real mention. Drop .AuthorTag from an override if that ping is unwanted — the badge in the notes export is unaffected.

MovedToSummary is how mrman refuses to drop a comment it could not place — see preflight for the reasons a comment ends up there. Keep that section in any override, or you will silently lose comments on submit.

The patch-reply template

:patch quotes the diff with your comments interleaved, for replying on a mailing list. Its data model (PatchData: the reply headers, one entry per file and hunk with the quoted lines, and the comments that could not be placed) is in internal/output/patch.go; the embedded default is internal/output/templates/patch_reply.txt.tmpl and the same upper, trunc, indent, join and codefence helpers apply. Start from the default when overriding — the quoting rules it encodes are what make the reply threadable.

Testing an override

mrman -w --stdout

Prints the notes export to stdout instead of the clipboard, so you can iterate on the template without leaving the shell. If you see the default output plus a warning in the status bar, your template did not parse.