Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bbn!jr@bbn.com
From: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: Re: SPC in auto-fill-mode
Summary: leave it as is.
Message-ID: <40405@bbn.COM>
Date: 24 May 89 14:11:27 GMT
References: <8905240322.AA13606@paris.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge MA
Lines: 20
In-reply-to: mcgrath%paris.Berkeley.EDU@GINGER.BERKELEY.EDU (Roland McGrath)

In article <8905240322.AA13606@paris.Berkeley.EDU>, mcgrath%paris (Roland McGrath) writes:
>In auto-fill-mode, at the end of a line at least twice fill-column chars
>wide, hitting SPC only splits the line once, forcing you to hit another SPC
>to break it again.  If you have one line 3000 chars long, you will have to hit
>SPC 40 times or something to get the whole thing within fill-column.

Yeah, but M-q is pretty easy to type.  If you don't want to stick the
long line to its neighbors, type C-@ C-a M-g for 3 characters.  If you
have to preserve whitespace within the line but break it anyway, then
C-x ( SPC DEL C-U 4 0 C-x ) for 9 characters (erasing all the spaces
to boot).

The do-auto-fill function which eventually gets called by SPC contains
no loops, whereas the fill-region family must.  I think the slowdown
of calling the latter every SPC might be a bit gruesome.  So I'd vote
to leave things as they are.  Who types 3000-character lines anyway?
:-)
--
/jr, nee John Robinson   What a waste it is to lose one's mind--or not
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr      to have a mind.  How true that is. -Dan Quayle