The Bat! - annoying word wrap

[oBFusC8r]

The Bat is a great e-mail client in lots of ways, but there is one thing that has annoyed me like hell for a long time, the word wrap feature.
Let me give you an example. Lets say I write a couple of sentences (due to extreme lack of imagination I have copied some parts of mousers latest newsletter).

We've just added a big new feature to the website that we
are really excited about and proud of, called Best Of Blog. 
It's designed for the casual reader; a daily blog highlighting
the best and most interesting threads on the forum every day.

Word wrap will kick in after 70 chars or so by default. The annoying thing is that if I want to change something in a sentence word wrapping does not make the words "flow" onto the next line like one would expect, instead the line gets longer until I press space somewhere somewhere at the end of it.

Below I have added some words to show the problem.

We've just added a big super cool new feature to the already magnificent website that we
are really excited about and proud of, called Best Of Blog. 
It's designed for the casual reader; a daily blog highlighting
the best and most interesting threads on the forum every day.

..and when I enter a space after "magificent" it becomes

We've just added a big super cool new feature to the already
magnificent website that we
are really excited about and proud of, called Best Of Blog. 
It's designed for the casual reader; a daily blog highlighting
the best and most interesting threads on the forum every day.

This annoys me a lot and causes some manual editing to get the text neatly aligned.

Does anyone have a solution for this problem? I have been searching the net and changed setting but failed to come up with any solution to the problem so far.

[mouser]

until you mentioned this it didn't rise much to my consciousness but i have to agree this is really annoying and i have to manually align stuff constantly.

you could use clipboard help+spell and add a text modifier preset to wordwrap at desired length, so that its available from the hotkey popup in clipboard help and spell, but it's still very annoying.  it would be nice if they could fix this.

[Ampa]

I think you will find the official response here...

http://www.ritlabs.c.../idx/17/015/article/

I just happened to come accross it last night.

Ampa

[mouser]

F*ing brilliant!
AMPA you rock.  Credits coming your way (i tried to find solution on web site and couldnt).

ps.
thebat -> you rock also.

ps2.
dc forum -> you rock also.

[mouser]

Just to save people a visit or in case the website goes down, here is what that page says:

The lines don't automatically wrap to keep the paragraph formatted, when words added or deleted
Place your cursor somewhere inside the paragraph and press <Alt+L>, <Alt+C>, <Alt+R>, <Alt+J> for Left Align, Centered, Right Align, Justified respectively. If you place the cursor inside the paragraph with the mouse, you must hit one of the arrow keys at least once to get the whole paragraph to reformat, otherwise it will only format the single line in which your cursor was positioned. 

works quite well actually.

[oBFusC8r]

thx Ampa!

That sure makes The Bat a bit easier to live with. I actually considered using another e-mail client because of this , but this solution will work for me. I do still think it would be better if the words could flow automatically to the next line though.

[superboyac]

On a similar, but perhaps unrelated issue:

Initially, I thought the MicroEd editor in the Bat was cool, but I find it being more of a nuisance than not since I've switched over to it.  Can someone describe what the usefulness/uniqueness of the MicroEd editor is?  The only thing I can think of is that you can click the cursor anywhere on the page and begin typing, but that's kind of a nuisance also.  Here are the issues I'm having:

--Since you can click anywhere to type, if you want to go to the end of the line, you have to make sure you click exactly at the right spot, or use the "end" key.  Normally, if you just click anywhere to the right of the last character of a line, the cursor won't go past that last character.

--Also, there's this automatic indentation thing that almost always happens to me.  Say you're writing, and you put a period and then the appropriate two spaces after the period.  If one of those spaces wraps into the next line, every line after that is now automatically indented.  This always happens to me, how do you guys deal with this.

Overall, I like MicroEd, but I was wondering what makes it "good" and why other users like to use it over the normal windows way of editing.

[mouser]

the auto indenting can be annoying..

i love the inplace spellcheck though..

[allen]

A bit late to the punch, but you may be even happier to know that by going to preferences -> editor preferences, you can check the "auto-format" option.  By doing so, it will automatically reflow paragraphs in real time while editing so you don't have to manually reformat it with the shortcuts mentioned above.  In the same section of the preferences, you can disable the auto-indent as well.

MicroEd was always one of my favorite features of the bat -- but I'm a huge plain text junkie, love persistent blocks and the free roam cursor (being able to click anywhere, not just in valid white space).

[superboyac]

I've always been embarrased to ask...what is persistent blocks?

[superboyac]

From the help:

If you use Persistent blocks text remains selected until you select another, hide the selection or delete the selected text. Otherwise, the selection will be automatically hidden when you move the cursor to another position, type some text, or insert some text from the Clipboard

I don't understand this.

[allen]

As for "hide" as mentioned in the help, I can only assume that by hide they mean to remove it from focus -- possibly by scrolling far enough in the document where it can't be seen -- but is still selected and manipulatable.  I don't know of anyway to, in literal English, hide a persistent selection.

The easiest way to explain it . . . would be this, I hope -- you're accustomed to non-persistent blocks. By blocks, I mean a "block" of select text.  In non-persistent blocks, moving the cursor unselects text. Entering a keystroke will overwrite the text (delete it) altogether.

With persistent blocks, however, this behavior changes -- the blocks of selected text literally persist.  When you move the cursor, the block of text will remain selected/highlighted unless you select/highlight another block of text.  Further more, keystrokes will apply normally where the cusor is, without interupting, unselecting or overwriting the selection.  Pressing ctrl+delete is the means, generally, for deleting a persistent block.

For me, personally, the benefits of persistent blocks are--
* moving the cursor to look around at other parts of the body of text will -not- cause your selection to be lost
* hitting a key will not accidentally delete the text
* Select now, use later.  Some times I know what I want to select, but am not sure what I want to do with it precisely -- and if I simply cut it to the clipboard, there's a good chance I'll forget about it
* In editors that support it (EditPadPro for example), you can select a block, move your cursor to a different location and duplicate or move that block of text to the cursor's location.  Normally this would require more steps -- copy/cut, find location, paste as opposed to simply hitting ctrl+d or ctrl+m to duplicate/move the block.

It's a somewhat subtle difference, but one I find myself unable to live without these days

Abridged, bottom-line version: Persistent selections are not unselected or overwritten by a keystroke like normal selections.  Instead, they remain until you move, delete or unselect them (by selecting something else).

[superboyac]

I get it now!  Thanks allen for that explanation, I just couldn't understand what it meant.  It's crystal clear.  I just tried using it, but I don't think it's for me.  One thing I can't deal with is I can't delete blocks of text at a time.  I have to delete one character at a time, or use the "cut" command.  Is there no other way?

[allen]

Absolutely -- this mode was meant to be productive, not counter productive.  It protects your blocks of text from movement and unintentional overright, bt you can delete a block --- ctrl+delete.