[vile] Fixed/flowed formatted text

[Paul van Tilburg]

Hi!

I've been planning to write out this idea, but haven't gotten around to
it until know.  The idea is inspired by the RFC on plain/text format
flowed/fixed text (2646) and instigated by the continuing discussion on
wrapping text edit-time or view-time and thus using explicit newlines to
wrap or just use newlines to start new paragraphs.
I hope it will lead to some discussion, I'm fairly unsure if it will
involve much work to implement.

Motivation

More and more I encounter the situation where I have to (co)author
documents/files where lines are not wrapped correctly or in a different
way because the editor of the others do things differently.  

Prime example being a LaTeX document where I wrap things manually using
vile's wrapwords & auto-format but other authors do not wrap and write
long lines and only use (two) hard breaks to indicate a new paragraph.
I always wrap to 75 chars (72 for mail) and my terminal is about
90–100 chars wide, so setting linewrap makes it look weird and messy.
I do this anyway, because the running text is important for me when
editing, which is undoable if the text runs out of my terminal for
a dozen vertical pages.

Description

I propose to introduce a new format mode "flowed" next to the current
one which can be quite suitably called "fixed".  In the "flowed" format mode
a (right)margin is set, possibly reusing the wrapmargin property
that already exists, and text is automatically wrapped before that
margin.  For example

>             | <- <
> foo bar baz |    <
> quux        |    >

Here > ...  < indicates the column width of the terminal (18), and |
indicates the set margin (set to 14).  If "garply" is inserted before
"foo" then "bar" and "baz" flow to the next line, etc.

>             | <- <
> garply foo  |    <
> bar baz quux|    >

This is already how nvi does it, except that it has a fixed margin
of 0 and it does not wrap correctly, namely it cuts in words.

I could also envision a form mode "combined", if you hate the
long lines yourself but are trapped by then.  Then vile just
wraps like mode "fixed" but flows lines that are longer.

Any comments,
Paul

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