Re: Manual line breaks in emails

> Le 24 mars 2026 à 17:10, Ben Knoble <[email protected]> a écrit :
> 
> 
>> Le 24 mars 2026 à 16:31, Dave Sizer <[email protected]> a écrit :
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I've noticed that there seems to be a trend in the plaintext email community where folks will manually insert line breaks in their messages seemingly to keep line width readable.
>> 
>> What I don't understand is, this is what line wrapping is for, and manually inserting the breaks actually makes the mails look horrible on most modern clients that try to do automatic wrapping.
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> Actually - I think I just answered my own question upon realizing that the Alpine built-in editor inserts breaks automatically, and my preferred external editor, Helix, does not wrap by default. Still, I would be interested to hear some opinions and maybe history on this from the community.
>> 
>> 
>>   - Dave
> 
> While this is sent from my iPhone unwrapped, when I reply via GMail’s client it rewraps text (including code I’d rather it didn’t).
> 
> I will say that clients setting the right combination of wrapping options to allow recipients to wrap at their choice of width is nice, since then mail is equally readable from my phone or computers.

If such a think exists, I’ve made it up :)

The other mailing-list heavy community I’m in hard-wraps around 70–80 columns (the lower number helps when quoted several times).