Text-Mode for a beginner

Text-Mode for a beginner

[John O'Connor]

Apologies if my question is of insufficiently cosmic importance. I am
trying to figure out how to make Emacs behave more like a modern editor
in its handling of paragraphs. What I mean by that is that I want to be
able to (as I do in, say, OpenOffice) type an entire paragraph without
having to put a newline at the end of every line. I know that
auto-fill-mode accomplishes this somewhat, but it has the unfortunate
side effect of inserting newlines everywhere, and when I paste my text
into OOo the line lengths will not conform to the width of the page. I
could just learn to live with the poor word wrap in the fundamental
mode, but then it's difficult to C-p or C-n through the paragraphs. Is
there a modern-text-mode or something like that? Thanks very much for
your help.

-Jack O'Connor

Re: Text-Mode for a beginner

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 30.10.2007 um 04:29 schrieb John O'Connor:

> Apologies if my question is of insufficiently cosmic importance.

Do you know the difference between a proportional spaced and a  
monospaced font? For the former the length of a line in some text  
editor has no meaning at all ...

You can set set fill-column to a large value, 99999 for example. Then  
line-breaks are most probably prevented (first break near column  
99999). You can use local variables in that buffer like here:

	% Local Variables:
	% mode: LaTeX
	% fill-column: 160
	% coding: iso-latin-9
	% End:

Text fill (fill-paragraph, M-q) tries to balance a paragraph's text  
in the window. This has nothing to do with text processing as for  
example in (La)TeX. It just gives your eyes some candy.

(What is a "modern editor" and its behaviour in your belief? Do you  
understand that WYSIWYG and GNU Emacs are diametrically different  
concepts?)

--
Greetings

   Pete

Behold the warranty ... the bold print giveth and the fine print  
taketh away.

Re: Text-Mode for a beginner

[Andreas Röhler]

Am Dienstag, 30. Oktober 2007 04:29 schrieb John O'Connor:
> Apologies if my question is of insufficiently cosmic importance. I am
> trying to figure out how to make Emacs behave more like a modern editor
> in its handling of paragraphs. What I mean by that is that I want to be
> able to (as I do in, say, OpenOffice) type an entire paragraph without
> having to put a newline at the end of every line. I know that
> auto-fill-mode accomplishes this somewhat, but it has the unfortunate
> side effect of inserting newlines everywhere, and when I paste my text
> into OOo the line lengths will not conform to the width of the page.


call `mark-whole-buffer' and `unfill-region' before
copying.

Andreas Röhler
> I 
> could just learn to live with the poor word wrap in the fundamental
> mode, but then it's difficult to C-p or C-n through the paragraphs. Is
> there a modern-text-mode or something like that?

text-mode (?)
> Thanks very much for 
> your help.
>
> -Jack O'Connor
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> help-gnu-emacs mailing list
> help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnu-emacs

RE: Text-Mode for a beginner

[Drew Adams]

> > type an entire paragraph without having to put a newline
> > at the end of every line.

M-x longlines-mode

,----
| longlines-mode is an interactive autoloaded Lisp function in `longlines'.
| (longlines-mode &optional ARG)
| 
| Toggle Long Lines mode.
| In Long Lines mode, long lines are wrapped if they extend beyond
| `fill-column'.  The soft newlines used for line wrapping will not
| show up when the text is yanked or saved to disk.
| 
| If the variable `longlines-auto-wrap' is non-nil, lines are automatically
| wrapped whenever the buffer is changed.  You can always call
| `fill-paragraph' to fill individual paragraphs.
| 
| If the variable `longlines-show-hard-newlines' is non-nil, hard newlines
| are indicated with a symbol.
`----

> Do you understand that WYSIWYG and GNU Emacs are diametrically
> different concepts?

No.

GNU Emacs contains the universe, including WYSIWYG.

Re: Text-Mode for a beginner

[rustom]

Xah Lee has some stuff on mapping emacs to modern usage habits
eg.
http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_html.html
http://xahlee.org/emacs/modernization.html

I learnt about long-lines from there. You may also want to look at cua-
mode

Re: Text-Mode for a beginner

[David Combs]

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In article <mailman.2752.1193745701.18990.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
Andreas Röhler  <andreas.roehler@online.de> wrote:
>Am Dienstag, 30. Oktober 2007 04:29 schrieb John O'Connor:
>> Apologies if my question is of insufficiently cosmic importance. I am
>> trying to figure out how to make Emacs behave more like a modern editor
>> in its handling of paragraphs. What I mean by that is that I want to be
>> able to (as I do in, say, OpenOffice) type an entire paragraph without
>> having to put a newline at the end of every line. I know that
>> auto-fill-mode accomplishes this somewhat, but it has the unfortunate
>> side effect of inserting newlines everywhere, and when I paste my text
>> into OOo the line lengths will not conform to the width of the page.
>
>
>call `mark-whole-buffer' and `unfill-region' before
>copying.
>

What is "unfill-region"?

Is not in my emacs (M-x version: 21.3.2).

If found and defined, Would it *work* in my emacs?

Thanks,

David

Re: Text-Mode for a beginner

[Peter Dyballa]

Am 23.11.2007 um 02:53 schrieb David Combs:

> What is "unfill-region"?
>
> Is not in my emacs (M-x version: 21.3.2).


Neither in GNU Emacs 23.0.50 or 23.0.60 ...

--
Greetings

   Pete

To drink without thirst and to make love all the time, madam, it is
only these which distinguish us from the other beasts.  — Beaumarchais