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Re: mutt or vi question..



On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 12:50:33AM +0100, Kevin O' Riordan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 'par' - the paragraph reformatter - is possibly whay you're looking for
> here.  Its own manpage describes it as "necessarily complex", which is a
> fair enough description.  Its homepage
> 
>     http://www.nicemice.net/par/

That looks pretty cool.


> Automatically reformatting mail is evil though.  What happens if/when
> people send you snippets from logs, long shell commands, pieces of
> source code, stupid ascii drawings/diagrams, config files, etc.?  If at
> all possible, telling people to be more considerate in how they send is
> the better option.

Yeah, that really works :-)  Especially when you are corresponding
with people who have no idea that their mail client is automatically
showing them wrapped text but is sending multi-thousand-character lines
over the wire.  

Of course, it's a matter of perspective.  To the person with the long
lines and whose mail client shows them wrapped text, you are the one
being intrusive by asking them to change.

Also displaying code, drawings, and other things you named is
problematic in clients that can't or won't display fixed-width
characters.

Perhaps email clients supporting RFC3676 style text would be progess.

mm