On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:41:13PM +0200, Thomas Roessler wrote: > I'm not talking about the *optimal* line width for *every* single > human being: I'm saying that short lines are much more readable than > long lines (because of horizontal eye movement), and that 60-80 > characters is generally a good line length to use. > > (Guess why every single participant in this thread uses that kind of > line length.) Well, as I stated already, I primarily use it because editing messages in lines of 80 characters or so is much more efficient than editing much longer lines, and readability has very little to do with it. In fact I often make my terminal somewhere between 90-120 characters wide, in order to have more characters for the index window, and I wouldn't have any objection to mutt filling in all that extra space that normally just goes wasted. I will not presume to speak for everyone else. ;-) > I object (and strongly) against claims that mutt's format=flowed > handler is "broken", or that not re-flowing lines on wide screens is > a "bug" when the actual code is (a) perfectly usable, and (b) the Well, to at least some users, the behavior is "wrong" (i.e. not what they expect, not intuitive, etc.). That may not technically qualify as a bug by most of our standards, but many people will be inclined to label any similar sort of thing as a bug, for lack of any idea what else to call it. I understand your point, but I think you're letting yourself get your shorts in a bind over a small semantic issue. > objection is really that we don't give enough rope to people to hang > themselves. Here I can't agree. This smacks of contempt for anyone who prefers a line lenght > 77 chars, as if that is some sort of magic number that every user should just "get" as being the right length for lines of e-mail. > > It doesn't matter what the reasons are; the fact is that some > > users want this functionality, and it's easy enough to provide > > without harming anyone. So what's the hangup? > > Give me a clean patch that implements this feature, and lets me keep > mutt's current behavior in the default configuration, and I might > include it, given the fact that there's apparently quite a bit of > demand for that. Fair enough. This functionality is not something I personally care about a great deal, but I do feel that it would improve mutt, which is one reason why I argued in favor of it.[*] If I have time this weekend, I may take a crack at it, if no one else beats me to it. > But please don't expect me to implement that, and also don't expect > me to acknowledge this as a "bug." Fair enough. -=-=-=- [*] The other reason, and much more important IMO, is that it is yet another perfectly reasonable feature request that seemed to be being beaten down, for absolutely no good reason. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers.
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