Re: longlines-mode and comments

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

On 29 Nov 2007, at 10:34, martin rudalics wrote:

>> (Also, when `longlines-wrap-follows-window-size' is turned on,  
>> then  the line/paragraph is reformatted.)
>> The expected (correct) behavior would be to add the comment command  
>> at  the beginning of the line in the file, i.e. at the beginning of  
>> the  paragraph, that is, after each hard return.
>> Note that the other expected thing there is that the syntax   
>> highlighting (font-lock) works, i.e. that the whole comment is  
>> shown  using the right face. This, IMHO, is a second bug.
>
> It's hardly trivial.  Have a look at the thread starting with:
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-11/msg00634.html

Sure, one can fix longlines to deal with further eventualities. But  
each of them is going to be a further hack, because code everywhere  
assumes that a line in the buffer is a line in the file, and  
everything else would be a lot more complicated.

Longlines mode has a number of shortcomings that can't be addressed  
within the current architecture: for instance it looks rather bad with  
variable-width fonts and with different font sizes in the buffer, for  
instance when editing long LaTeX documents using AUCTeX.

The alternative is display-time word wrap (DTWW), and Kim Storm has  
developed a patch that was supposed to be applied after the 22.1  
release:

http://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org/msg03729.html

There was a good discussion in 2005 with the same conclusion:

http://www.nabble.com/flyspell-+-longlines:-hang-wait-t448677.html

I wish this could be updated and applied. Every modern text editor has  
this. It is really needed when you want to write text and not code on  
non-TTY displays.