Re: longlines-mode and visual-line-mode

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Deniz Dogan <deniz.a.m.dogan@gmail.com> writes:
>> After briefly trying these two modes, I haven't found any significant
>> difference between them. It looks like longlines has all the features
>> for visual-line-mode. Is my impression correct? Thank you.
>
> This is not the case, as I understand it.  For an example, fill a
> buffer with a very long line in longlines-mode and resize the window.
> Then turn it off and switch to visual-line-mode and resize the window.
>  Notice the difference!  visual-line-mode turns on word-wrap (a
> variable) which is what gives this differente behaviour.
>
> IIRC, longlines-mode is/was a hack which was introduced due to the
> lack of something like word-wrap in earlier versions of Emacs.

Also of course, because longlines-mode _modifies_ the buffer to do it's
thing, it's more dangerous, far less efficient (think of a large
buffer...), and far more likely to interact in unforseen (and likely
bad) ways with various modes...

-Miles

-- 
White, adj. and n. Black.