Is there a way to have emacs draw a line vertically down the screen indicating the largest width possible for text so that each line on emacs will print out (using lpr defaults on standard paper with 1" margins) as one line without wrapping?

I don't know of any emacs modes (or scripts) that would
have that kind of feature. But why don't you just set
auto-fill mode on with a width you know will work?

E.g.:
M-x auto-fill-mode
C-u 60 C-x f
to automatically wrap lines on column 60.


Cheers,
Tink

Sounds good, how do I then add that to my .emacs file? Also, do you have any idea what column length is close to what would fill up a printed page (or whatever is standard on tools on *nix systems)?

Sorry, no idea what the standard number of characters - 2" would
be ...

With the first question I can help, though :)
I've set mine to 66 because that's what professional
type-setters have said to be pleasant on the eye to
read, and I agree ;)


Cheers,
Tink

66 it is, thanks

Actually, I added those lines to my .emacs and it doesn't seem to have changed anything. Is that supposed to auto-wrap on the screen when you get past 66 characters (which isn't happening) or affect only printing or something?

It works with the emacs major text-mode.

So, if the buffer you're editing isn't in that mode,
nothing will happen.

To activate it if it's NOT turned on:
M-x text-mode

If you need in different text-modes add appropriate hooks.


Cheers,
Tink

When I do M-x text-mode, the bottom changes from (Scheme) to (Text Fill), but I can still type more than 66 characters without it wrapping.

It's not something silly like the missing apostrophe at
the beginning of the '( ... )? I didn't paste those.


Cheers,
Tink

Hmm, I have:

Odd. "Works for me""(tm).

Emacs 21.3.1 that came with Slack 10.1?
And does the manual method work for you?

What does the rest of your .emacs look like?


Cheers,
Tink

Emacs 21.3.2 that came with Slack 10.0.

The manual method doesn't work either (let me just make sure I understand this right, that I'm supposed to open a new buffer, type those commands, then type more than 66 characters and it should wrap there instead of going to the end of the line?).

When I do it the manual way, it says something like "fill width set to 60 (was 66)" which seems to imply that the .emacs change did go through. I then do M-x text-mode which changes the bottom to "Text Fill," and then I can type to the end of the screen before it wraps (much more than 60 characters). The rest of my file is:

and some Scheme config I mentioned in another post (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=368623).

Is the whole thing too big to be posted here?


Cheers,
Tink

No, I just don't feel comfortable posting config files for all to see for some reason, even if they don't have any personal information. I checked through it again, though, and all that is there are the lines I gave above, a few macros (fset 'name ...), and:

I had a similar problem and I thought my Emacs was broke. Pressing Space/Enter on a line is supposed to split (i.e. fill) the line if it is longer than the fill width.

Eventually I realised that the auto-fill is not triggered if you press Space/Enter in a column which is before the fill-width value. I was entering text from the beginning of the line, pushing it past the fill width!