Self-introduction of a new vimpulse user

Sun Oct 31 20:55:39 CET 2010

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