Re: the justifying of indented text

[Benno Schulenberg]

Op 20-12-2019 om 22:41 schreef Seb:
> [...]  I think there is also another way to look at this. If auto-indent is
> OFF, then a ^<Tab> was not magically added [by] Nano, it was entered manually,
> deliberately, by the user.

That is true when the relevant piece of text was entered during the current
session, and with the current setting of autoindent (OFF).  But what when
(part) of the relevant text already existed and is merely being edited?

Anyway, this would mean that nano would be allowed to justify only text
that is fully-unindented, text with zero leading whitespace.  But in my
world not all texts are like that.  Look at nano's README, for example.
It are the section headings that are unindented, and all running text is
indented by four spaces.  Even Pico can justify such paragraphs.  Run for
example 'pico -r88 +9 README' and type ^J.  Why should nano not be able
to justify this without having to toggle autoindent ON first?

It annoyed me for a long time that nano was unable to justify indented text,
before I finally realized that it worked when autoindent was ON.  But even
after having realized that, it still annoyed me, because I would try to
justify a piece of indented text, it wouldn't work... f*ck, M-I ^J M-I,
grrr, why can't the damned thing just do it right away?!

(Note, by the way, that Pico pushes the "Furthermore," to a separate line,
even though it fits perfectly at the end of the third line.  Nano justifies
the paragraph correctly.  Also note that if you first type some extra spaces
before typing ^J, Pico sees the first line as a separate paragraph.  Nano
keeps treating the whole paragraph as a single one.)

>> Anyway, for your use case, I've improved the "Christmas-present" patch:
>> when autoindent is ON, you can also justify tab-indented long quotations,
>> and even tab-indented bullet lists.
> 
> Very nice, thank you! Does this have any chance of making it into Nano's
> future release?
Not in its current form.  I want to keep the current behavior of not caring
about the autoindent setting when justifying indented paragraphs, at least
as the default.  Maybe I will have to add an option after all, --paragraphic
or --oldstyle or something like that, that brings back the behavior that you
want.

Benno

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