[mgulick]

I'm surprised by the recommendation to use format=flowed. I set up thunderbird a while back to use the recommendations from the LKML: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/email-clients.... Doesn't format=flowed mangle patches?

I've also disabled wrapping (as recommended in that document), however I'm not a big fan of it. I do think that plain text wrapped at 72 or 80 characters looks much nicer. I wish thunderbird allowed me to select portions of the text to wrap, or to disable wrapping for selected portions (e.g. a code snippet). Is this handled better in other email clients?

[ignaloidas]

Now that page recommends using git send-email, on which the author also made a tutorial: https://git-send-email.io

[Sir_Cmpwn]

Thanks for the link - this is indeed my stance, I don't think people should be pasting patches into their daily MUA.

[Boulth]

That should be highlighted more. Not using git sendmail is the problem, not format=flowed.

[u801e]

> Doesn't format=flowed mangle patches?

It will because every line would end in a single trailing whitespace character. But that doesn't mean you cannot use Thunderbird with format=flowed enabled to respond to patch emails. Unless you're including a patch in the message and expect someone to use git am to apply it to their local git repo, having format=flowed set won't matter.

> I wish thunderbird allowed me to select portions of the text to wrap, or to disable wrapping for selected portions

You can sort of do it by copying unwrapped text from another program and pasting it into Thunderbird as quoted text (ctrl-shift-o or paste as quotation). But you will need to manually remove the quote markers from the beginning of each line.

[cpbotha]

If you do format=flowed correctly, then code is not mangled.

However, there is a higher risk (than with hard-wrapped) that users can mangle code with format=flowed.

[u801e]

I think it comes down to a lack of flexibility with the MUA composer. If you're using an editor like vim to compose the email, it would be easy enough to read the patch into the message by running

  :r file-containing-patch

And then visually highlighting text and running:

  :'<,'>s/$/\s/

to append whitespace to lines you don't want to be hard-wrapped in clients that support format=flowed