The auto-wrap is just a convenience-thing^TM to help calculate the number of characters needed for a certain font to fit into a certain window width.

It assumes, I suppose, that the text is normally “normal” and thus the calculation is based on a non-bold font size.

If it assumed all bold then it would under-estimate for text which is usually not bold.

I don’t think this is a bug - you know that the wrapping occurs at a character count and not a pixel count. If the auto-wrap (which is something you would not frequently use) underestimates then just bump up the count a bit manually.

Adding a bunch of dead space that makes the client look like something is broken and also takes away from the usable room for other things is not user-friendly.

This is the first time this has come up since the client was released in 1995. For this to look “broken” the user would have to enable display of bold (which I personally don’t do because a lot of so-called “bold” text looks weird if it is displayed in a bold font) and have a lot of discrepancies about the amount of bold text from line to line (otherwise the RH margin would not be noticeably out.

Bold text is already displayed in different colours, to make it stand out. Actually using a bold font is perhaps overkill for text. That’s why I don’t enable that option.

Anyway, it could conceivably wrap the lines at a calculated pixel width (based on the current font) however that would be somewhat slower than counting characters. Each line would have to be re-rendered (internally) character by character, as they arrived, to see if they reached the desired wrapping point.

Then you have the somewhat major issue of, what happens if someone alters their font mid-session? All the line wrapping will be out, since it was based on pixels and not character counts. So potentially all the (thousands of) lines would have to be re-wrapped, possibly breaking existing plugins which might be keeping track of things. For example, the bookmark feature bookmarks lines. What happens if the line wrapping changes?

To make this work smoothly and reliably sounds like a lot of work, for a problem that has only surfaced after the client was released 25 years ago.

OMFG! 25 years ago! That was before Facebook, YouTube, eBay, and so on. It seems a lifetime ago.

How’s the air quality these days by the way? Did you hear? Now we’re on fire. It never rains, but it pours!

Yes I did hear. We had major bushfires last Summer, and now you have them. But don’t worry, apparently the Earth is going to get cooler soon.

The air quality here is fine, we are just coming out of Winter, plus we have a fairly severe lockdown, so there aren’t many cars on the road.