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I hate to ask an off-topic question here, but is it considered good/bad practice to word-wrap plain text emails?
by barumrho 15y ago
I hate to ask an off-topic question here, but is it considered good/bad practice to word-wrap plain text emails?
- telemachos 15y agoI think so, yes. Certainly, something like this is very common in Mutt configuration files: set editor="vim -c 'set tw=75 ft=mail noautoindent'" The 'set tw=75' bit, sets the text width to 75 columns.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoNot actually necessary these days. vim knows to match the names used for mutt temporary files, and automatically puts uses mail mode and a sensible text width.
- pyre 15y agoIIRC tw=72 is set whenever you change the filetype to 'mail'
- caf 15y agoThis might not actually be that off-topic, because I think the underlying reason that git commit messages are stored line-wrapped is for ease of sending them unmolested through email.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoGood practice. If you don't word-wrap plain-text emails, each paragraph will show up as one long line; the program reading your mail on the other end can't wrap it automatically, because it might represent code, ASCII art, terminal transcripts, or something else that shouldn't get wrapped. So, wrap your paragraphs in plain-text email at some sensible column. Common convention suggests 72, because that allows for a few rounds of quoting before it passes 80.