Re: does emacs wrap lines that are exactly 80 characters long??

[Barry Margolin]

In article <bf23f78f.0310291130.16f9c787@posting.google.com>,
Christian Seberino <seberino@spawar.navy.mil> wrote:
>I don't know what this means but Python style guide says to set Emacs to 79
>character long lines....
>
>    There are still many devices around that are limited to 80
>    character lines; plus, limiting windows to 80 characters makes it
>    possible to have several windows side-by-side.  The default
>    wrapping on such devices looks ugly.  Therefore, please limit all
>    lines to a maximum of 79 characters (Emacs wraps lines that are
>    exactly 80 characters long).  For flowing long blocks of text
>    (docstrings or comments), limiting the length to 72 characters is
>    recommended.
>
>I don't seem to have a problem with 80 char long lines.  Maybe I'm
>missing something
>here??

What size is your window?  The comment is probably referring to Emacs being
used on a traditional 24x80 terminal.  With a window system, you can change
the window size, and the wrapping will be appropriate to that size.

Also, prior to Emacs 21, Emacs wasted a column for the "\" character that's
used to indicate that a line has wrapped (Emacs 21 replaced this with a
marker closer to the window border).  So a line that's exactly the window's
width would be wrapped -- the first n-1 characters would be on the line,
then there would be a "\", and then the next line would contain the nth
character.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barry.margolin@level3.com
Level(3), Woburn, MA
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