Soft wrap (again?)

[Sergio Callegari]

Hi,

I know that the matter has been discussed in the past (e.g., 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex/2012-01/msg00025.html), 
however looking at those past discussions I could not find a solution to 
my specific problem, so please take my apology in advance for re-opening 
the topic.

I am not interested in opinions on what one should use or the relative 
merits of hard wrap over soft wrap or viceversa. Independently of this 
(and even of my own preferences) I often need to cooperate with other 
people who use tools based on the soft wrap approach (e.g. TeXStudio or 
the online Overleaf editor) and follow their choices. Basically this 
means that I often need to use soft wrap too.

In Emacs, using soft wrap means disabling auto-fill, rewiring your brain 
so that you do not press "ESC q" mechanically, and enabling the 
visual-line-mode. Even with this you miss all the nice indentation that 
auctex provides, though. You can get a bit closer to it by enabling the 
adaptive-wrap-prefix-mode. This is more or less what I found in the 
previous exchanges.

However, I still miss one thing: the adaptive-wrap does not seem to 
understand braces. Hence, when some "macro argument" gets wrapped, it 
gets no indentation. For instance, I get

\section{This is a rather long section name that
gets wrapped}

and not

\section{This is a rather long section name that
  gets wrapped}

The same goes with \emph, \foreignlanguage, \textbf, etc. Particularly 
when things get nested it becomes a burden to check where the arguments 
end and whether the braces are matched.

So my question is: are auctex and adaptive-wrap-prefix-mode two 
completely independent packages, or is it possible for auctex to use its 
"understanding" of LaTeX to provide hints to adaptive-wrap-prefix-mode 
about the amount of spaces to use in the prefix for each soft wrapped line?

Thanks and best regards,

Sergio