Re: Manual line breaks in emails

On 2026-03-25, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> 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.

There's a secret third thing - "text/plain; format=flowed". Clients that 
support it will reflow the text while other clients will display it 
wrapped at 72 (or whatever you prefer) columns. My emails are formatted 
this way.

To enable it in Mutt+Vim:

(muttrc)
set editor = "vim -c 'set syntax=mail ft=mail enc=utf-8'"
set text_flowed

(vimrc)
autocmd FileType mail setlocal cc=72 fo=awq

https://incenp.org/notes/2020/format-flowed-neomutt-vim.html