On 2010-10-31 19:20, Christoph LANGE wrote:
Other than that, and I'm aware that on a list related to text editors, I am opening a can of worms, my opinion is: Most contemporary mail clients wrap mails with long lines to the width of the window. 70 characters on a widescreen is IMHO not always user-friendly.
Actually, there exists a technical solution to this problem: Format=Flowed. The idea is that the mail client inserts a space at the end of each line it breaks, so that lines are divided by a space+newline sequence rather than just a newline. These are referred to as "soft" line breaks. A mail client which knows about Format=Flowed will ignore the soft breaks and flow the text, while a client which doesn't will display it as regular hard-broken text (since the trailing spaces are invisible). I know Thunderbird supports this by default, but I haven't used it as I prefer to edit my mails outside of Thunderbird. (Plus that I would need to come up with a way to distinguish flowed passages from unflowed, since I don't want code fragments and the like to flow. It's not impossible -- I tend to indent code by four spaces, so I could conceivably write a routine in Emacs which overlooks such lines and adds trailing spaces to the rest.) Format=Flowed is defined in RFC 2646, which see: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt -- Vegard