Being nice in FLOSS communities

I read a lot of floss mailing lists, and hang around on freenode. I counsider myself a part of the community.

Sometimes i think though, that some people simply dont know how to be nice. They would seem to have insults and belitteling comments bound to shortcuts in their editors of choice. Living, as i do, inside emacs, makes it seem quite plausible. Perhaps we could simply provide a friendly substitution table? So instead of 'what part of X didnt you understand, are you an idiot?' bound to m-x insult, we could bind 'I also find X hard to grasp, lets work it through together!' bound to m-x nice!

Anyway, just a thought. I dont mind so much myself these days, but I did once. I was met with some very annoying comments from people claiming to be Gimp developers, which led me to work on Inkscape instead(turns out Inkskape fits my style of art much better, so all was good in the end). Other lists are so unfriendly so I dont even bother to communicate there. So, I can manage, but I think we in the community can do better, especially towards newcomers that might eventually become great contributors.