On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 09:33 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca> writes:
> 
> > Visual-line-mode is a replacement for longlines-mode; it soft-wraps
> > text at the screen boundary, and does a much better job than
> > longlines-mode did.
> 
> I think you're confused by a (helpful) conflation.
> 
> The ‘visual-lines-mode’ is indeed a replacement for ‘longlines-mode’,
> but its job is to cause editing commands to act on visual, rather than
> logical lines.
> 
> The wrapping behaviour you're describing is performed by ‘word-wrap’, a
> buffer-local variable that cuases lines to be visually broken at word
> boundaries.
> 
> The ‘word-wrap’ variable is set by ‘visual-lines-mode’, which is why
> you're seeing it happen. But ‘word-wrap’ is independent of this.
> 
that's very helpful.  but see below...

> > Is that what you needed? I'm not sure where the code for
> > visual-line-mode lives -- there isn't a visual-line.el anywhere that i
> > can find on my system.
> 
> Fortunately, ‘visual-line-mode’ appears to be a distraction from what
> you're describing; Carsten only needs to learn about ‘word-wrap’.
> 
would you expect then that i should see the same difficulty if I
evaluate '(word-wrap 1) in a buffer using org-indent-mode?  Because when
I do that, the wrapping seems to occur as expected and, importantly, the
indentation level is preserved too.  So to my extremely unpracticed eye
it seems that visual-lines-mode does something to the wrapping behaviour
that makes problems for org-mode.  

Does anyone else use visual-=line-mode with org?  I'm sort of surprised
no one would -- it seems a completely obvious choice to me and it may be
that I'm just missing something about optimum work flows or similar.  

Anyway, thanks again,
Matt