Re: org-store/insert-link truncating the full subject of mails

[Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:

> I don't know. This is why I agree it is safer to limit length to an
> arbitrary number instead of allowing any size.

Hoping to find an actual answer, I did a =git blame lisp/org.el=
and found the commit that introduced it,
2c16f092e64915a7e3d0b2dda82f3978a0f42dea, by Carsten Dominik,
the creator of Org mode himself.

I emailed Carsten yesterday and asked if he recalls why he
introduced that variable and that behvaiour.  He said that he
doesn’t recall exactly, but that either it was aesthetic (he
didn’t find extremely long link descriptions pretty), or that
long lines slowed down some regular expressions that ran in the
buffer.  He said it was most likely the first one (aesthetic),
and that he wouldn’t object to lifting the restriction.

On a side note, I’d like to point out that I use C-h k, C-h f,
and C-h v many times a day, especially when encountering new
functions or variables.  But I don’t know if I’m the minority, or
if most other Emacs users check the docs frequently as well.

That said, I still find the default a bit obtuse and frankly
unexpected.  I don’t know, maybe a nice middle ground between the
current behaviour and completely removing the limit would be to
increase the limit from 30 to 78 characters, the recommended
maximum number of characters in a line according to RFC 2822 [0].
That somehow feels less arbitrary, and would cover a larger
portion of subjects.

[0]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-2.1.1

> I updated the manual instead. It now mentions
> `org-email-link-description-format'.

Thanks for that.

Best,
amin