Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Kai Großjohann]

Daniel Andersen <dani_ande@yahoo.dk> writes:

> I'm quite new to emacs and I have a question which has bothered me a
> long time. I'm writing a book and started using emacs insteed of Word,
> which I got pretty much tired of, but there is one thing which annoyes
> me; when I have written a long sentense and it is wrapped to many
> lines on the screen, then when I want to go on "screen-line" up in the
> same sentence, it jumps to the previous paragraph insteed, which means
> that I have to move the cursor along the line insteed to get upwards.

Emacs uses the traditional Unix text file layout.  This means that
there is a "hard newline" after each line, and paragraphs are
separated by empty lines.  You can use M-q to refill a paragraph if
there are too-long or too-short lines in it.  M-x auto-fill-mode RET
allows you to produce short lines when typing normally.

It would be very difficult to make Emacs work differently internally,
but there is a tool, longlines.el, which inserts newlines when
reading from disk and removes them again when writing to disk.  That
way, the files have the one-line-one-paragraph style whereas the
Emacs buffers use the many-lines-per-paragraph style that Emacs
expects.

Warning: I wrote longlines.el initially.
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