Re: [Nmh-workers] Line wrapping in mhl

[Paul Fox]

ken wrote:
 > So this has bugged me for probably forever.
 > 
 > Putting aside the crappy MIME handling, one of my biggest
 > annoyances when doing repl on a message is that when lines are
 > long, they get wrapped poorly.  Basically, right now if they exceed
 > the column width they are broken at that point.  To me, this sucks.
 > 
 > Fixing this requires some subtle surgery to mhl, which doesn't look
 > terrible.  But it begs the question ...  what's the right behavior? 
 > Break at a space?  If so, what should we do about the "next" line? 
 > I confess to being a bit unsure.  If we have format=flowed, yes,
 > the decision is easy (mhl doesn't know about that just yet, but it
 > could).  But it seems right now that modern mail programs assume
 > that everybody is doing line wrapping and paragraph reflowing, and
 > I'm wondering if we should just get on board with that.
 > 
 > (It goes without saying that this would be adjustable via a mhl
 > format setting).

if the quoted text itself contains quoted text with right-margin '>'
(or other) characters, the problem gets even worse.

my text editor has built-in commands to help deal with that, so i get
by (i used it, above), but honestly, i think this sort of problem is
best left to an external tool, which mhl could be configured to
invoke.  for instance, "par" purports to solve this pretty well
already:  http://www.nicemice.net/par .  (i've never tried it, but i
keep the link around in case i need to.)

i'd prefer that mh not try and be (too much of) a text processor.

paul

 > 
 > --Ken
 > 

=---------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 33.1 degrees)