1139059 - Provide a button to toggle word wrapping for sections

Status: REOPENED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[krichter]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Build ID: 20150224133805

Steps to reproduce:

Composed a mail with a part which ought to be wrapped (the description of a bug report) and a part which shouldn't be wrapped (a backtrace - as requested by famous free software projects, e.g. Linux)


Actual results:

There's no way to do that intuitively. It might work when disabling the word wrapping in `about:config` and using the wrap function in the edit menu, but that's over the line complicated


Expected results:

The function should be provided by an item in the edit menu in order to make thunderbird suitable for daily tasks in software development.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I can't test word wrap right now and never using it, but would this help?

If there's a selection and user uses re-wrap command, just rewrap selection.
Otherwise rewrap the whole text (except stuff we don't wrap like quotes etc.)

Comment 2

[krichter]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #1)
> I can't test word wrap right now and never using it, but would this help?
> 
> If there's a selection and user uses re-wrap command, just rewrap selection.
> Otherwise rewrap the whole text (except stuff we don't wrap like quotes etc.)

Yes. That's what I'm missing.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

sounds like bug 234029 (which itself might be a duplicate of bug 187997)

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I recommend against conglomerating all the rewrap bugs.
Rewrap is an unpredictable mess, with various shortcomings in UI and behaviour.
I'm not sure if fixing the behaviour automatically entails fixing all of the UI, too.

If anything, this bug might be a duplicate of bug 187997, because reporter is missing extra UI due to the fact that Edit -> rewrap on selection did not work as expected, or not at all. Sometimes rewrapping a selection does nothing, sometimes it does something wrong, and maybe rarely it does something right.

Not having rewrap in context menu (bug 234029) looks right a bug in its own right which would be easy to fix IF the behaviour of rewrapping sections would be reliable (otherwise we'll just expose the faulty functionality more). Which sounds more like dependency than duplicates. Just my 2 cents.

Comment 5

[chrizilla]

I tend to agree with Thomas in comment #7.
In addition to this, rewrapping is a one-way street, whereas the reporter requests as per the bug title:

"a button to toggle word wrapping for sections"

This would go both ways.

The closest match I found is bug 169691, which requests as per the bug title (something) to

"toggle line wrap on/off for current composition in plain text"

The reporter of bug 169691 doesn't specifically request a button to accomplish this.
I added this idea in comment #9 of bug 169691.