<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: How to display format=flowed (and other topics)?



On 2005-10-12 13:21:36 -0400, Derek Martin wrote:

>> Reflowing to the width of the terminal or GUI windows is, what 
>> format=flowed is all about. Not doing it is certainly a bug.

I'm sorry, but that argument goes too short.  format=flowed tells us
that the author is happy about having their text re-flowed.  It also
makes it easier to re-flow text.  But why does that mean that we
*have* to reflow it, instead of making the best use of that
information to make messages as readable as possible?

> I would have to agree.  I would never use this personally, but it
> rather does seem to be the point.  If everyone wanted to read
> lines at n < 80 columns, we would not have any need for this
> method of formatting at all!  

Wrong.  People read e-mail on PDAs and mobile phones (with 40 or
less columns -- i.e., line lengths that are far below the kind of
formatting that you would want senders to inflict on "ordinary"
readers), and format=flowed comes in very handy there.

>>>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

> Certainly, mutt could have a variable such as
> flowed_text_max_width to solve this.  If 0, mutt uses the whole
> width of the window.  It could also do that if set to a value
> greater than the width of the current terminal.  Then, everyone
> gets what they want.

Well, no.

There's a second decision in the code: To only re-flow things if
that has to be because the line doesn't fit the display. It
shouldn't be too difficult to change that, but still, I rather
stubbornly believe that mutt's current code gets it right.

-- 
Thomas Roessler · Personal soap box at <http://log.does-not-exist.org/>.

Attachment: pgpgvkUgL7ULO.pgp
Description: PGP signature