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

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2019-06-25 19:46:39 +0200, Moritz Barsnick wrote:
> 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 ...

I've noticed that too.

> %c is what shows the size of the message in the index.

Note that the %c value also depends on the encoding, but this may
be less surprising.

> 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.

Yes, perhaps the reason I do not use %c. And the fact that the
scaling facteur is on the right instead of the left makes this
even harder (that's a bit like the American dates MMDDYYYY).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)