Re: change in fill-paragraph

["B. T. Raven" <nihil@nihilo.net>]

ken wrote:
> On 04/19/2008 09:24 PM B. T. Raven wrote:
>> ken wrote:
>>>
>>> With the versions of emacs I've been using for years, fill-paragraph 
>>> won't fill/reformat include in its definition of a paragraph any line 
>>> which begins with a space.  However, the newer emacs version I use at 
>>> work will.  That is,
>>>
>>> (1) In the older versions, this will be
>>> one paragraph.  M-q will reformat it
>>> fine.  I like it this way.
>>>  (2) In the older versions, having just a
>>> single space at the beginning
>>> of a line tells paragraph-fill that this is
>>> a separate paragraph.  So this would be a
>>> separate paragraph.
>>>  (3) In the new emacs version, all of these
>>> would constitute one paragraph and so be
>>> filled together.  I would much prefer the older way
>>> fill-paragraph works... so that (1), (2), and (3)
>>> stay where they are.
>>>
>>> How would I restore the old behavior to the new version of emacs?
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks much.
>>>
>>
>> You can get this with
>>
>> "(paragraph-indent-text-mode)
>>
>> Major mode for editing text, with leading spaces starting a paragraph.
>> In this mode, you do not need blank lines between paragraphs
>> when the first line of the following paragraph starts with whitespace.
>> `paragraph-indent-minor-mode' provides a similar facility ..."
> 
> Thanks for this, but I didn't want to change the entire mode, as the 
> behavior above by fill-paragraph happens also when I'm using 
> html-helper-mode, what I use for editing/creating html.  It may well 
> happen in other modes also, e.g., perl-mode, c-mode... not sure, because 
> I haven't tried a lot of other modes at work yet.
> 
> In brief, I just want to change the behavior of fill-paragraph back to 
> what it was previously for all modes.  If paragraph-indent-minor-mode 
> will do this, what would I need to put in ~/.emacs to invoke it for any 
> file I might open and not have "paragraph-indent-minor-mode" show up in 
> the mode line?  (My mode line already is already occupied with all it 
> can accomodate.)

I just typed M-x paragraph-indent-minor-mode in a text-mode buffer and 
it didn't change anything on the mode line. Then I did unfill paragraph 
on some indented and unindented random strings with no blank lines and 
they were treated as indented paragraphs. Then M-x text-mode turns off 
this minor mode.

> 
> 
> Again, thanks for your help.
> 
> 

I don't have any experience with these modes; they are new to me too and 
I just looked them up in the docs. I am happy with a blank line as 
paragraph separator and I don't see any need for the old conventions for 
paragraph-start and paragraph-separate. Maybe tweaking these two 
variables would give you what you want. Why do you want it anyway, may I 
ask? If it's for publication, you would want to run the file through a 
page layout program (TeX, Auctex) which will lose the blank lines, 
indent new paragraphs, and a whole lot more.