Is linewrap dead?

[Kurt Hackenberg]

On Mon, Sep 05, 2022 at 07:40:54PM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:

>>It seems a little conceptually cleaner to have the editor do the 
>>whole job, rather than divide it between the editor and Mutt. But 
>>another complication is that you can edit a message more than once...
>
>I think space stuffing is effectively an escape mechanism, like quoted 
>printable; not something you see at authoring time. The RFC even says 
>"(Note that space-stuffing is conceptually similar to dot-stuffing as 
>specified in [SMTP].)", which is again a transport level escaping.
>
>So we need the overt trailing-space stuff because that's an indicator 
>of end-of-paragraph in f=f, but not the space stuffing, because that 
>is only needed to transport the text.

Space-stuffing doesn't have to be shown to the user while editing, but 
it's part of format=flowed, and it's required, not optional. The 
paragraph before the one you quoted is this:

     On generation, any unquoted lines which start with ">", and any lines
     which start with a space or "From " MUST be space-stuffed.  Other
     lines MAY be space-stuffed as desired.

<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3676.html#section-4.4>