meaning of number of lines in the message (%l in index_format)

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 10:45:07 -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 10:33:11AM -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> > > On Monday, 2019-06-24 18:41:56 -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> > > > Or just remove it.  If it's not accurate (or even if it is) what value
> > > > can it really provide?
> > >
> > > Even if it isn't accurate it gives me a rough idea about the size of the
> > > message (usually after viewed already which calculates the value),

I agree. OTOH, I have received messages with large one-liner HTML
attachments which obviously seemed small. Or people write plain text
paragraphs without breaking lines ...

> > There's already %L for that (size of the message), which should always
> > be precise, and serve this purpose better.  Just saying...
>
> Sorry, I'm not entirely awake yet.  That's not what %L does... It
> shows the size of the currently displayed messages in the index menu.

%c is what shows the size of the message in the index. The advantage
with %l is that its number of digits is log10, so by the number of
digits, you can quickly glimpse the magnitude of the size. While it's
nice that %c automatically reduces to k/M, it's hard to see the
difference between 1.3k and 1.3M at a quick glimpse across the index.

Cheers,
Moritz