Paragraph command not respecting leading non-content formatting characters about ne HOT 3 CLOSED

Hmm. This is in the category of "historical accident". There was a brief time when the Paragraph command tried to do what you indicated above, and it usually worked out alright. But there were lots of corner cases -- paragraphs that had nothing to do with programming or that contained comment-like characters that weren't comments at all -- which prompted us to revert back to a "dumber but consistent" behavior. Looks like the docs didn't make the transition.

I would like to have a comment-aware paragraphing option, but not at the expense of breaking normal text. Ne is supposed to be a Nice Editor, where unexpectedly mangling your text is decidedly Not Nice. I hope to revisit this issue some day.

from ne.

Thanks, Todd. Glad to hear it may be revisited in the future. Super useful feature, IMO, even if it were strictly limited to a subset of prefixes (like "> ", "// ", "# ") or to even just one prefix ("> ") to start with.

Maybe it would be possible for the user to set a default pref that says, "consider only the following strings as formatting prefixes when reflowing text with Paragraph: ...", if that simplifies and tightens things up.

Also, not sure if this is a corner case you were thinking about trying to solve, but I see that in code, lines of code usually directly follow comment lines (with no empty line between them). I could see how making Paragraph smart enough to handle that corner case would be complicated, and I would not expect Paragraph to try and figure that out. Paragraph works on paragraphs (delineated by blank lines). That is, I'd be happy to and expect to change:

// Comment line 1.
// Comment line 2.
function code(goes here) {...}

to

// Comment line 1.
// Comment line 2.

function code(goes here) {...}

before hitting [p on that comment block to Paragraph it, and then go back and remove the extra newline.

from ne.

It occurs to me that I could also use the ne Through command, and have a small shell script do this. I'll give that a try.

from ne.