On Thu, Apr 15, 1999 at 05:44:36AM -0400, Andrew Brown wrote:
> >> >Speaking of which:  Are there any text editors which have a mode
> >> >where paragraph justification happens constantly?  Emacs probably
> >> >has one, but I don't think I want to start my mom on Emacs.  ;-)
> >> 
> >> i think pico (part of the pine distribution) is what you want.  but i
> >> hate pico, so don't ask me how to use it.  :)
> >
> >Well, "pico" will wrap lines (so can "vi"), but to make it rejustify you
> >have to hit Control-J. That's still not what Peter wants, which is to
> >justify automatically. The only editor I've ever seen that does that, runs
> >on a Macintosh, but you probably don't want to hear about that... :)
> 
> that's funny...i was sure it did that automatically.  that was the
> only explanation i could come up with for why things like sendmail.cf
> and named.boot got royally screwed up when edited by admin that was
> not me.
> 
> it also "solves" the problem of people sending me long-lined log
> snippets that are "line-wrapped" at about that column in an
> infuriating manner.  and why, after i "unwrap" them for a reply, the
> reply to my reply has them wrapped again.

I'm pretty sure that when pico does that it breaks lines to make them
fit, but it does not join lines together and reflow the whole paragraph
as you type. Put the cursor before "reflow" in the line above, type in
a few words, and you see this whole paragraph reformat as you type.
With the cursor at "Put" above, delete (forwards) and watch all the
later lines being sucked up like a snake as more and more characters
are deleted. That's what he wants, and I've never seen pico do this.
I have seen it happen with the ee editor supplied with FreeBSD, in its
autoformat mode. To the user it feels as if it really is treating the
text as paragraphs, not as groups of lines.


-- 

Regards,
        -*Sue*-