Re: longlines-show-hard-newlines - should not the default be t?

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Miles Bader wrote:
> "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <address@hidden> writes:
> > I think the default value should be t. I think longlines can be quite
> > confusing otherwise.
>
> The current behavior is _exactly_ like the overwhelming majority of
> windows/mac/gnome/etc text-entry displays:  they treat hard newlines as
> paragraph boundaries, but do not visually differentiate them from
> automatically wrapped lines.  [Though the difference is usually fairly
> obvious because of whitespace]

That is not nice, you are stealing my usual arguments ;-)

I often get frustrated by the fact that hard newlines are not displayed 
in other applications. For example trying to cowrite something with 
someone unaware of this may be a lot of extra work.

This has been addressed in word processors, but admittedly they do not 
show hard new lines by default. I guess however that this is because 
they normally have less technical aware users.

> There are certainly times when one wants to explicitly show hard
> newlines, but it shouldn't be the default.

One reason to show hard newlines as default is that Emacs displays the 
buffer different when longlines-mode is on. It is then an analogy to the 
fringes shown for wrapped lines.

> -Miles