Re: Re: Manual line breaks in emails

On Sun, 29 Mar 2026, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 28, 2026 at 14:07:35 -0500, Grant Taylor wrote:
>> On 3/28/26 12:04 PM, Dale wrote:
>>> I'm not sure what I should see.  The part above is ever how wide my
>>> window will allow.
>
>> That's what format=flowed does, cause the logical line to wrap at the
>> window width.
>
> That's assuming there's a window with width, which isn't necessarily the
> case.
>
> When I read format=flowed mail on alpine (aka pine) over ssh, it doesn't
> get wrapped at all; it is displayed on lines 240 characters long, the
> width of the console.  This is not comfortable to read.
>
> Mail with linebreaks every 70-80 characters is somewhat easier to read
> for me.  I don't believe alpine can be configured to behave better with
> format=flowed.
>
>> Take a look at the message source (control U) and you'll see that the
>> physical lines are wrapped at ~72 characters.
>
>>> I'd like it to wrap at some number, maybe 80, maybe 100.
>
>> It sounds like you are wanting the display of the logical line to be
>> wrapped at 80 or maybe 100 characters.
>
>> That's controlled by the window width.  Read:  Make the window narrower.
>>   ;-)
>
> Yuck!  That's a horrible thing to have to do.  Why should a message's
> line width have anything to do with the window width?
>
> mutt behaves better than alpine when displaying format=flowed messages,
> breaking lines at around 70 or 80 characters.  I think there's a
> configuration variable for this.

Have you looked at the viewer-margin-right config in Alpine [1]? That 
defaults to 4 it looks like, meaning that flowed text will always be 
wrapped only 4 columns from the right of your window. It sounds like you 
want to increase that value.

 	-Dave

[1] https://alpineapp.email/alpine/alpine-info/misc/flowed.htmlB