The terminology is confusing, especially with me having come from Vim:
"horizontal" in this case means a vertical split, because they are stacked
horizontally.
My previous window layout put the body of the article below the summay,
which left a lot of whitespace to the right of my 272-column terminal. So I
went from
-------------------------
| S | T |
|-----------------------|
| A |
-------------------------
to
-------------------------
| S | |
|-----------| A |
| T | |
-------------------------.
This also lays out nicely with BBDB:
------------------------- -------------------------
| S | T | | S | A |
|-----------------------| => |-----------|-----------|
| A | | T | B |
|-----------------------| -------------------------
| B |
-------------------------
I have been sitting on this for a while (since it is incomplete), but this
is the majority of my Emacs configuration. I have been using Emacs for less
than a year, and have been astounded by the flexibility afforded by its
implementation of most functionality in Lisp.
Plenty more to come.
Allows me to decrypt sent mail for future reference. Disallowing decryption
by myself is not much of a practical concern, since replies are generally
quoted. That said, if it were ever a concern, this could be easily disabled.
This provides room for three-digit line numbers, plus a delimiting space, on
an 80-character terminal. If additional lines numbers are needed, the file
is probably too big.
This is also more polite for e-mail.
This allows for both easily splitting configuration files and for per-system
configuration (for the latter, one need only put another file in the
directory).
And here come the rationale for this sensitive topic:
- Source code should wrap at 80 characters; be polite and give room for
line numbering. Four characters is room for up to 999 lines, followed by
a space; if the file exceeds that length, it is probably difficult to
work with, because it's hard to keep that much in working memory.
- Allows for up to three levels of nesting for e-mail quoting (">>> "). I
really hope more than that is not needed. If it is, modern editors can
easily reflow text (e.g. `gq' in vim).