Re: trouble indenting looooong lines with visual-line-mode

[Allan Gottlieb]

At Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:16:58 -0700 (PDT) Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sep 1, 8:21 pm, Allan Gottlieb <gottl...@nyu.edu> wrote:
>> (I am using emacs 23.1)
>> Start with emacs -Q and a buffer in fundamental mode
>>
>> Consider a line wider than the frame, for example
>>
>> xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
>> xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>> which exceeds an 80 column frame.
>> Now assume you have a short line say
>> yyyy
>> followed by the above long line, i.e.
>> yyyy
>> xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
>> xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>> So far so good.  Now indent the long line with say one space.
>> If visual-line-mode is OFF, I see what I expect, the long line is
>> preceded by one space.
>>
>> But with visual-line-mode ON, a blank line appears on the screen between
>> the short and long lines, i.e. the long line (with only one word) was
>> wrapped.
>> This behavior seems wrong.  I am getting burned in the following case
>> among others with html
>>
>> <ol>
>>   <li>
>>     <a
>>       href="a-looong-url-that-naturally-contains-no-blanks">
>>       go here
>>     </a>
>>
>> When the looog-url exceeds the line length a blank line appears
>> after the <a
>>
>> I realize the blank line is not in the file so the browser is not
>> affected, but I find a plus of html to be that it reads well in emacs
>> even when not formatted (by say w3m).
>>
>> Am I correct in viewing this as a bug?  If so I will file a bug report.
>
> it's not a bug. It's a natural behavior of smart word wrapping. Try
> that in any word processor, you see the same behavior.

False.  I just now tried openoffice (writer) and it gives what I
expected: the long line of x's preceded by one blank.

allan