On Sun, Jul 31, 2022 at 06:09:56PM +0200, Thomas Wei??schuh wrote: >currently mutt always prepends `$indent_string` verbatim to each line when >quoting messages. >When quoting parts of messages that themselves already were quoted this leads >to additional space characters in addition to the quote characters. ... >I would like to modify the quoting algorithm to remove those additional spaces. > >``` ># Quoted twice (new) >quux >> baz >>> bar >>>> foo >``` > >Even if such a patch is not acceptable to the main mutt project because it is >in maintenance mode, I would like to gather feedback from the list about >potential issues with interoperability and standards-conformance.
You may not have to modify code. I have this in .muttrc: set indent_string = '>' You can see the results of that above. You could argue that should be the default value of $indent_string. I agree there should not be a space after the '>'. The trouble is, that space is ambiguous: software can't tell whether it's part of the quoting or part of the original message. RFC 3676 (text/plain format=flowed) forbids that space, for that reason. If you propose that software add a space after the rightmost '>', but not after others, I think it's thirty years too late to change that quoting mechanism. You'd have to change all the mail readers in the world, and also RFC 3676. We know that won't happen.
