On Sun, Jul 07, 2019 at 09:59:15AM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote: > I'm curious about your experiments with composing flowed text. I'm > using vim invoked thus: > > vim \ > -c 'silent 1,/^$/s/ *$//' \ > -c 'set filetype=mail' \ > -c 'set formatoptions=waqj' > > which produces a ... workable experience. It is a little prone to > minor breakage and I do go back to check for the trailing spaces used > to mark flowed lines. > > I'd be happy to find improvements. > > What did you try, and how did it fail? What was good?
Right now this is my vim configuration for mail (not flowed, but fixed-with): setl tw=72 setl fo=watqj setl nojs setl nosmartindent setl noautoindent " Mark trailing spaces, so we know we are doing flowed format right "match ErrorMsg '\s\+$' " Better way "setl list set formatprg=par\ 72q Right now this makes for a quite pleasant experience too; I have to reflow replies manually so that par does its magic, but that's fine. I stopped using flowed format because I like doing stuff like this: 1. A list, in which the paragraph gets aligned to the first letter of the block, so it's more noticeable. Otherwise it just looks like a regular paragraph with a number at the beginning. And, as far as I can tell, this cannot be done correctly with flowed text. Plus sometimes I send e-mails to lists that need to copy & paste code and one needs to be extra careful with that. In the end, I didn't find any obvious advantage to the flowed format (apart from the fact that, yes, it degrades gracefully when one's reading the e-mail on a phone or something like that) and I went back to this option. Cheers, -- José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org/
