On Sat, Oct 01, 2022 at 10:01:00AM +0100, Chris Green wrote: > Well it's not entirely off topic, it's about something that works as > I'd expect it to in vile (and less) but doesn't work right in mutt (my > E-Mail program of choice). > > The issue is about how long chunks of text, with no spaces in them, > are wrapped when they are too long to fit in the terminal width. The > typical case (and the one that is a particular problem in mutt) is > that of long URLs. This *isn't* about how these programs manage > wrapping normal text made up of 'words' with spaces in between. > > In less or vile when there is a long piece of text and you have told > less/vile to wrap long lines then the long URL (or whatever) is > displayed wrapped at the right margin but it is still a single string > and you can select it in the terminal by right clicking on it. > > In mutt (in mutt's internal pager specifically) however, although the > URL is displayed the same (i.e. wrapped at the right margin) it's > actually broken into one or more lines and you *can't* select it by > right clicking on it, you just get the single line that you click on. > > This has been discussed at length at various times on the mutt mailing > list and hasn't been solved.
I'm subscribed to mutt-dev (don't recall it there). Perhaps mutt-user... (none of the mutt development gets very deep into this stuff) > Is there some specific way of using/calling ncurses which does what we > want? ... and/or does ncurses default to breaking the string at the > page margin and need some option to prevent it doing this? It's a special case of xterm (imitated by more than one terminal emulator, though probably not _all_). xterm notices when a line is written and wraps. Screen updates that simply write to the end of a line (including a previously "wrapped" line) make it forget about follow part of a line. less and vile have an advantage over ncurses in deciding if a line is wrapped -- ncurses can't tell if an application writes text (using one of the wrapping calls such as waddch) intending to construct a long line. Actually, long lines in mutt for me have a "+" marking the beginning of the following lines (which iirc is configurable). > I'm floundering a bit at understanding this as I'm not really sure > it's an ncurses issue but it does seem to be pretty much the same > regardless of other things. I use /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal but the > same happens to lots of other people and I have tried other terminal > emulators and seen no change. > > Can anyone throw any light on this? > > -- > Chris Green > -- Thomas E. Dickey <dic...@invisible-island.net> https://invisible-island.net ftp://ftp.invisible-island.net
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