Re: [vile] Some issues/features

[Thomas Dickey]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010, Paul van Tilburg wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have some issues/ideas I wanted to share.  If you want me to file bug
> reports about it, I am happy to.  But maybe discussing a bit first is
> better.
>
> 1. Reformatting in bulleted lists.
>
> I often write a paragraph for some list item as follows:
>
>  * This is a nice piece of text in a bulleted list
>    and this is the next line and there is even more
>    on the next line but that doesn't really matter.
>
> But when I try to reformat the region using ^A-f, I get:
>
>  * This is a nice piece of text in a bulleted list and this is the next
>    * line and there is even more on the next line but that doesn't
>    * really matter.

Offhand, I'd think the place to tweak this is here:

   comment-prefix=^\s*\(\(\s*[#*>]\)\|\(///*\)\)\+

The relevant chunk of code seems to be the first part of this:

        if ((plength = comment_prefix()) >= 0) {
            is_comment = TRUE;
            tb_bappend(cp,
                       lvalue(DOT.l) + DOT.o,
                       (size_t) (plength - DOT.o));
        } else if (cplus_comment_start(c)) {
            is_comment = TRUE;
            tb_bappend(cp, "//", (size_t) 2);
        } else if (c_comment_start(c)) {
            is_comment = TRUE;
            tb_bappend(cp, "*", (size_t) 1);
        }

Essentially what it's trying to do is to replicate the part of the 
previous line that matches the comment-prefix pattern onto the next
line.  The other two parts of the chunk could be improved by adding
modes to enable/disable those.

> This is not really what I want.  The help explains that it tries to do
> the "right" thing, but since I'm not doing any C-code here, it's doing
> the wrong thing.  Is there something wrong with my settings?  Even if it
> would be the "right" thing for C", should it format it as follows?
>
>  * This is a nice piece of text in a bulleted list and this is the next
>  * line and there is even more on the next line but that doesn't
>  * really matter.
>
> 2. The wrapmargin/fillcol settings.
>
> I usually set wrapmargin to -80 and have word wrapping enabled as to not
> exceed the 80-col convention while inserting text.  Sometimes
> post-reformating is very useful, so I've tried setting fillcol=75 (and
> 72 for mail).  However, when you then type 80col-wrapped text and then
> later reformat, the text changes, while it should be idempotent.
> Because the help info suggestes that using both is not a wise idea, I
> tried setting wrapmargin=-80 and fillcol=0 but than something weird
> happens.  If I open a file and take the following sentence:
>
>  This is some sentence that is supposed to be longer than 75 characters
>  to illustrate my example.
>
> and I reformat it, I get a
>
>  This is some sentence that is supposed to be longer than 75 characters to kind 
> of ilillustrate my example.
>
> which puzzles me?

I'm puzzled here - sounds as if the line is not being wrapped in the 
result.

> 3. Text format flowed/fixed
>
> This is mainly inspired by RFC 2646.
> Mostly, I write text in a fixed format.  A paragraph contains of several
> lines that fill 80 columns maximum (preferably 75) each and is ended
> with an empty line (2 times LF).  This works for example great for
> LaTeX.  However, I sometimes coauthor a document with someone who uses
> the flowed format.  This means a paragraph is a long line that is not
> wrapped and ended with LF (or CRLF).

yes - this was something that I intended looking at - and 9.8's out,
so it would be nice to start working on this feature.  That, and working 
on a different X driver were my current plan.

> The fixed format case is well-suported in vile through wrapword,
> wrapmargin and fillcol.  Now, to deal with the flowed format case, I can
> disable word wrapping and enable linewrap, however it's rarther
> ugly/unusable because linewrap cuts in the middle of words and you
> cannot set the right margin.  It would be great if vile could support
> this mode of editing as well.  I'm not sure what is exactly needed to
> make this work; I guess some setting for the linewrap margin and an
> online wordwrap algorithm.  Also, I wouldn't know what region
> reformatting (^A-f) should do in this case.  Any ideas?
>
> Thank you for your time.
>
> Kind regards,
> Paul
>
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Thomas E. Dickey
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