Re: visual-line-mode and line wrapping

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> In the discussion of the trashbin feature, visual-line-mode came up.
>> It seems many of us would like it to be able to wrap lines at
>> a position other than the window edge.
>
> I still haven't heard any good argument for it, as compared to using
> wide fringes, wide margins, or by splitting windows.
>
> I do think it could make sense in one case: when you want the
> wrap-width to be larger than the window-width.  But AFAICT nobody has
> asked for that yet.

I thought I've said such in the past, but in case not:

One problem with the "fringe/margin approach" is that it always exactly
tracks physical window size, which is sometimes annoying.  For instance,
it would be nice to have word-wrapping that wraps to 80 or 72 columns
without having to result to multiple word-wrapping mechanisms (e.g., the
old lisp-based modes).

Also, it would be nice if one could bound the width used for wrapping so
that when a window becomes wider than a certain size, the wrapping width
would stick at some maximum -- this is because extremely wide paragraphs
can be hard to read.  Similarly, when windows become narrow than some
width, it would be nice if wrapping actually respected some _minimum_
width, so that you don't end up with the text in a single narrow
vertical line (the text is probably unreadable either way, but at least
with the bounded-width version, you can get a more sensible idea of the
document structure).

[Not commenting on the technical difficulty of doing these, just saying
there are reasonable use-cases.]

-Miles

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