Re: word-wrap (visual-line) and indents

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 5:37 PM, David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).


I have tried to implement this in `wrap-to-fill-column' (which is part
of nXhtml currently). Can you test it and see how it fits? I can
imagine you may want to split out the indentation part, I just have
not done that yet (since no one has seemed very interested until today
;-) ).


> 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.
>
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>