Subject: Re: bug#23169: 24.5; Inconsistent text reflow in man pages depending on window configuration

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2016 20:40:40 +0300

> From: Lluís <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Date: Fri, 01 Apr 2016 17:13:55 +0200
> 
> > The usual way to fix these problems is to set Man-width to a non-nil
> > value, as appropriate for your frame/window dimensions.  Would that
> > solve the problem for you?
> 
> Thing is I don't know the width of the window that will be used, since in some
> cases it does not exist yet:
> 
>   +-----+                   +--+--+
>   |     |                   |  |  |
>   |     | -> M-x man man -> |  |  |
>   |     |                   |  |  |
>   +-----+                   +--+--+

Isn't the window that man will use half of the window before the
command?  Then you know the width in advance, because you are familiar
with your window and frame configurations

> The ideal without breaking the asynchronicity would be to somehow display the
> new buffer on a window before populating it (display-buffer might or might not
> reuse a window here), calculate its window's width, set COLUMNS, asynchronously
> call man to populate the buffer, and then really show the buffer on the previous
> window.
> 
> The only problem is that creating a temporary window just to calculate its width
> could annoy people because the contents won't be shown yet.

Yes, that's the problem.