On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 11:21:42AM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
The purpose of this email is to propose that the expectation that
emails should be wrapped at 80 characters when they are sent should be
dropped.
[...]
I understand that there are historical reasons for the 80 character
limit, but I believe that it is time to reassess best practices. My
recommendation is that sending email programs should not wrap text at
an arbitrary column, and that all wrapping of text should be handled by
the receiving program, which is, of course, the only program that has
insight into the width of the screen where the email is currently being
displayed.
I have composed this email without an arbitrary column wrap, so that
those receiving it can see how it is handled by their various clients
and devices.
I found your email difficult to read. I mostly read email in mutt in a
tmux shared with my IRC client, so I normally prefer to keep that window
fully maximized for the benefit of IRC, but email tends to be a bit hard
to read if it actually takes up the full width there. Sender-wrapped or
format=flowed (which mutt renders quite nicely by default these days)
works well for me as a receiver; unwrapped doesn't really.
This thread did, however, cause me to work out how to configure my
mailer to send format=flowed, since it does look as though that's
somewhat nicer for receivers who aren't using the same kind of dinosaur
setup as I am, and support seems to have improved since the last time I
looked at this eons ago. I needed this in ~/.config/nvim/init.vim
(should also work in ~/.vimrc):
au FileType mail setlocal formatoptions+=w
And this in ~/.muttrc:
set text_flowed
That seems to work pretty well. I reflowed the parts of your message
that I quoted here to match.
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
