word-wrap (visual-line) and indents

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

Speaking of word-wrapping, I thought now would be a good time to bring up the missing feature of per-line indentation when word wrapping.

A recent conversation is quoted below, pointing out that word-wrap is less than ideal when it comes to displaying e-mail (and the like).
A similar example would be org-mode, where you would begin a (buffer) line with "- " or "  - "  and where word-wrap would, ideally, recognize such indentations.  

A buffer-local variable indicating a regexp that matches indentation prefixes would be ideal.  (As a feature, I would even suggest that if the regexp has a \\(group\\), the only the length of that group is taken as the indentation length.

To display the actual indentation, I think auto-fill-mode used the same prefix string that was recognized.  This was fine for e-mail quotes, but always very annoying visually for lists with "- ".  I can see that the latter used to be necessary for org-mode, because buffer lines were created when auto-filling, but the visual word-wrap doesn't have to respect that.

Indentation with spaces would be sufficient, given that e-mail quotes can also be highlighted by color.   However, if repeating the prefix is desired, then one could make this configurable per buffer (either prefix or spaces).



On May 24, 2010, at 3:06 PM, Ralf Angeli wrote:
>>> By the way, speaking of nuisances, the lines in your mails are too long
>>> which makes them hard to read.
>> 
>> What mail client do you use? 
>> If in Emacs, try M-x visual-line-mode.  Or set word-wrap to t.
> 
> Visual Line mode does not seem to be able to cope with prefixes like
> quote markers.
> 
>> I can't predict how wide your window is today, so lines can't be broken here.