Re: Manual line breaks in emails

On 2026-03-24 20:31:24, Dave Sizer wrote:
> So why do people do it? Is it for readability on the composing side because their input editor or terminal doesn't wrap? I understand the aversion to automatic wrapping when it comes to code, but for normal language it seems like the standard approach to expect automatic wrapping, and only apply line breaks between paragraphs.

Both options are bad. I'm reading this in a 40x159 terminal, and your
paragraph looks a lot worse than mine. Print designers spent lots of
time and money determining the optimal width of a printed paragraph,
and while it depends on a few factors, the upper limit is around 80
columns. Emacs just so happens to wrap at 70.

I've tried to read one of my own messages on a phone before, so I know
how they look, but there's no universal solution -- your way looks bad
on my screen and my way looks bad on yours. You can argue that I
should resize my terminal to be 80 columns wide, which is actually
pretty easy in this case because 159 is so close to 80*2, but that
isn't always possible. And ideally the message should look good both
when I am composing it, and when everyone else is reading it.

Given the sort of messages I send (you're not reading patches on a
phone), I choose to throw phone users under the bus.