On 2025-02-27 13:29 +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 11:21:42AM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > > The purpose of this email is to propose that the expectation that emails > > should be wrapped at 80 characters when they are sent should be dropped.
I admire your gumption for making such a proposal. :-) A few years ago I would have objected strenously, as mutt+jed did not deal well with long lines, and it was a pain to read. I have even been known to berate people sending me such email. However it seems to work fine these days so whilst long lines are harder to read, it's not a big deal. I too am using the 'mutt in tmux/mosh on a remote machine' method to read my mail. (I do really like the smart reflowing that emacs can do, even with indented mails). The biggest problem with this method these days is not text wraping, but enormously long multiline URLs, especially when buried in incomprehensible modern HTML, and multipart mails whern the text/plain part is actually just another copy of the bloody HTML part - an infuriating thing that is becoming more common). I know that others can find wrapped text difficult to deal with because they are just not used to it these days. If you send an article in in that form, it is likely to retain unwanted wrapping linefeeds in the final version because taking them all out is hard for normals (they just do it by hand in word/indesign/whatever and miss the ones that happen to align linewraps).. And in-line answered mail with indenting carets can also end up as completely mashed garbage all flowed onto one big para at the far end which is very hard indeed to read. This is other people's crappy tools, but if one can make allowance for that without too much trouble them one should. So another vote for text=flowed here as a recommended default. And if people want to use unwrapped lines, then I won't exactly like it, but I'll manage. I already do for quite a lot of email. > This thread did, however, cause me to work out how to configure my mailer to > send format=flowed, This is probably the most useful email in the thread. Cheers. I have added set text_flowed to my mutt but I think I need to know the equivalent to au FileType mail setlocal formatoptions+=w for emacs particularly, but also zile, jed and mcedit (all of which get used from time to time). Anyone know? Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware http://wookware.org/
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