On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 08:35:25AM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
> I am having a mental block, and cannot remember how to
> wrap text in Emacs while composing an email. Specifically,
> I need help remembering what key, or keys, should be
> pressed after selecting a region of text to get that 
> region reflowed according to the current settings.

What I do is put a line like this in my .emacs at the top

(setq-default major-mode 'text-mode)

I believe this causes Emacs to treat files like text unless it sees a
special file extension or perhaps something in the file itself to tell it
otherwise.

and then further down where it has a line that says

(custom-set-variables

add this:

'(fill-column 76)

which is the "standard". And then all you have to do is ctrl-e to the end of
a sentence or paragraph and press the space bar and it will autowrap.

You can M-x emacs-lisp-byte-compile-and-load

and you should have your new settings. If not, exit from Emacs and come back
in again.


> I am using Debian Wheezy. I am using Mutt and Emacs as
> installed by the Debian installer. Or maybe I have also
> forgotten some special configuring that I had to do to
> get this reflow working.

I think the above is all you need. If it doesn't work, show us what you have
for your .emacs and let us know if it says (text-fill) on the bottom, in
your status line somewhere. I am not using Debian but Emacs is pretty much
Emacs everywhere.

> I really don't need to be told RTFM. I am 80 yrs old. 
> I forget things. 

You don't have to be 80 years old to have a hard time figuring out how to
setup Emacs options! I can't figure much out from the manual either so I
usually search for what I'm looking and find an example that works and then
go backwards if I want to understand it.

/jl

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