term-mode: allowing reflowable text

term-mode: allowing reflowable text

[Michael Hoffman]

In term-mode, when the terminal process supplies more text than can
fit on a line, term-emulate-terminal puts text into the buffer up to
the current number of columns, inserts a hard newline, and starts
again on the next line.

I have modified my own copy of term-emulate-terminal to just keep
putting text into the buffer without these hard breaks. This allows me
to resize the window later and text produced in this way will reflow
dynamically, which is very convenient for most programs I run,
avoiding new awkward soft line breaks when the window becomes smaller
later.

Would the maintainers be interested in a patch that implements this
behavior depending on the value of some variable (perhaps called
term-add-hard-newline, defaulting to t/the current behavior)?

Many thanks,
Michael Hoffman

Re: term-mode: allowing reflowable text

[Chong Yidong]

Michael Hoffman <b3i4old02@sneakemail.com> writes:

> In term-mode, when the terminal process supplies more text than can
> fit on a line, term-emulate-terminal puts text into the buffer up to
> the current number of columns, inserts a hard newline, and starts
> again on the next line.
>
> I have modified my own copy of term-emulate-terminal to just keep
> putting text into the buffer without these hard breaks. This allows me
> to resize the window later and text produced in this way will reflow
> dynamically, which is very convenient for most programs I run,
> avoiding new awkward soft line breaks when the window becomes smaller
> later.
>
> Would the maintainers be interested in a patch that implements this
> behavior depending on the value of some variable (perhaps called
> term-add-hard-newline, defaulting to t/the current behavior)?

Yes, this sounds useful.  Please send the patch to bug-gnu-emacs.

Note that if the patch is longer than about 20 lines of changes, we can
only include it in Emacs if you make a copyright assignment; I hope you
will be willing to do that.  But first, please post the patch to
bug-gnu-emacs for inspection.