Re: refill paragraph but visually (like visual-line-mode)?

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 12:54:42PM +0200, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> On 2018-10-15 at 18:21, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Such options don't exist.  You need to keep in mind that
> > visual-line-mode (or "word wrap", as this feature is known in the
> > internals) is just a semi-kludgey hack: we tweak the line-continuation
> > code to start the continuation line on whitespace characters.  Other
> > than that, it's still the same continuation line, and uses the same
> > code to detect when it's time to wrap the line.  And even this
> > relatively simple tweak makes the line-wrapping code devilishly
> > complicated and hard to wrap your head around.
> >
> > It is possible that making the wrap coordinate controllable by users
> > is not too hard, but Someone™ should look at the relevant code and try
> > making it happen.  Maybe we will be lucky.
> >
> > Wanna try it?
> 
> isn’t it what visual-fill-column-mode does?

No, it does something very different to achieve basically the same effect. It simply widens the margins, which aren't used to display text, so the text area is reduced.

Doing this in the line-wrapping code (i.e., make the wrap coordinate controllable by the user) might be the better way to implement it, because it should theoretically become possible to exclude certain parts of the buffer from wrapping, i.e., tables or source blocks in Org files. (I've had this request for visual-fill-column-mode once or twice, but it's simply not possible.)

But if the line-wrapping code is already devilishly complicated, as Eli says, it's probably unlikely to happen...

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments