Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!STARBASE.MITRE.ORG!israel
From: israel@STARBASE.MITRE.ORG (Bruce Israel)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: (supposed) Trouble with auto-fill
Message-ID: <8812211320.AA13590@starbase.mitre.org>
Date: 21 Dec 88 13:20:11 GMT
Sender: daemon@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: gnu
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   From: lrs@esl.esl.com (Lynn Slater)

   Reasons why I like the 18.52 version:
     I used to often encounter the case where I would see that I was past
   the normal column, would press return, and would have autofill fill
   the line and then move me to the NEXT line.  Mentally, I wanted to be
   on the next line, so I pressed "return".

Yeah, I used to complain about the same problem.  What I did was bind CR to
a key that would compensate for autofill.  What it did (doesn't really work
anymore in 18.52 since the behavior changed) was put in a newline and then
take it out.  If it didn't autofill, then it put in a newline for real,
otherwise it put in a space instead.  It's not the most elegant idea in the
world, but it generated exactly the sort of behavior *I* wanted from the CR
key.  I'm not so sure this should be the default, or that it's the behavior
that people who aren't familiar with the internal details would expect as a
conceptual model, but it works like I like.  For those who are interested,
the function is as follows:

(defun new-newline (arg)
  "newline that handles text fill side-effects."
     (interactive "p")
     (if (> arg 0)
          (let ((curcol (current-column)))
            (newline)
            (delete-backward-char 1)
            (if (>= (current-column) curcol) (newline)
              (just-one-space))
            (newline (1- arg)))))

Bruce