[gnu.emacs.bug] SPC in auto-fill-mode

mcgrath%paris.Berkeley.EDU@GINGER.BERKELEY.EDU (Roland McGrath) (05/24/89)

In auto-fill-mode, at the end of a line at least twice fill-column chars
wide, hitting SPC only splits the line once, forcing you to hit another SPC
to break it again.  If you have one line 3000 chars long, you will have to hit
SPC 40 times or something to get the whole thing within fill-column.

jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) (05/24/89)

In article <8905240322.AA13606@paris.Berkeley.EDU>, mcgrath%paris (Roland McGrath) writes:
>In auto-fill-mode, at the end of a line at least twice fill-column chars
>wide, hitting SPC only splits the line once, forcing you to hit another SPC
>to break it again.  If you have one line 3000 chars long, you will have to hit
>SPC 40 times or something to get the whole thing within fill-column.

Yeah, but M-q is pretty easy to type.  If you don't want to stick the
long line to its neighbors, type C-@ C-a M-g for 3 characters.  If you
have to preserve whitespace within the line but break it anyway, then
C-x ( SPC DEL C-U 4 0 C-x ) for 9 characters (erasing all the spaces
to boot).

The do-auto-fill function which eventually gets called by SPC contains
no loops, whereas the fill-region family must.  I think the slowdown
of calling the latter every SPC might be a bit gruesome.  So I'd vote
to leave things as they are.  Who types 3000-character lines anyway?
:-)
--
/jr, nee John Robinson   What a waste it is to lose one's mind--or not
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr      to have a mind.  How true that is. -Dan Quayle

mcgrath@paris.Berkeley.EDU (Roland McGrath) (05/25/89)

In article <40405@bbn.COM> jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) writes:

   Yeah, but M-q is pretty easy to type.  If you don't want to stick the
   long line to its neighbors, type C-@ C-a M-g for 3 characters.  If you
   have to preserve whitespace within the line but break it anyway, then
   C-x ( SPC DEL C-U 4 0 C-x ) for 9 characters (erasing all the spaces
   to boot).

   The do-auto-fill function which eventually gets called by SPC contains
   no loops, whereas the fill-region family must.  I think the slowdown
   of calling the latter every SPC might be a bit gruesome.  So I'd vote
   to leave things as they are.  Who types 3000-character lines anyway?
   :-)

M-q fills the paragraph.  I don't want to fill the paragraph; I want to make
the damned line fit on the screen.  I most often have this problem when
joining two lines, and then wanting to split the new (single) line to fit
within fill-column.
--
	Roland McGrath
	Free Software Foundation, Inc.
roland@ai.mit.edu, uunet!ai.mit.edu!roland
Copyright 1989 Roland McGrath, under the GNU General Public License, version 1.