On 2005-10-12 | 10:11:11, Thomas Roessler wrote:
By re-flowing, you mean "extend the line width to 140 characters"?
To whatever width the terminal can display.
No, mutt doesn't do that. And no, it's not a bug. If mutt-ng does it, it's a good reason not to use mutt-ng.
Reflowing to the width of the terminal or GUI windows is, what format=flowed is all about. Not doing it is certainly a bug.
Why? Reader-friendly lines are well below 80 characters long.
For printed newspapers it is customary to limit the line length to about 30 characters, BUT
1.) newspapers would otherwise have lines far longer than on a computer
screen
2.) newspapers use columns
3.) newspapers are seldom held exactly horizontally
4.) newspapers use hyphenation
In fact there are some scientific studies on online reading performance
(Dyson and Kipping, Duchnicky and Kolers) that show that longer lines
are read faster than narrow ones.
Currently, the format=flowed handler will try hard not to output lines over 77 characters long. I regularly use mutt in xterms well over 80 columns wide, because that's useful for the index. But I would object to a change to mutt that would reformat any format=flowed message to the full width of that window just because we can.
Then this should be made configurable as almost everything else in mutt
Additionally, the format=flowed handler is written to do as little re-flowing as possible, on the theory that format=flowed messages are normally formatted to be well readable as plain text. From my mail reading experience, that theory has proven to be largely right.
Ancient terminals were limited to 80 characters. Ancient user agents did not do any rewrapping at all. Ancient transport agents employed line buffers limited to 80 charcters. Format=flowed was designed to overcome these limitations and nicely rewrap messages for bigger windows and terminals while remaining compatible with old applications.
Tom -- PGP encrypted mail preferred - KeyID 96FFCB89 finger thomasz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx for key
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