Mutt: setting the maximal line length

Question

Some mails don't break lines when they reach a certain length, which makes them a pain to read in Mutt. Mutt will wrap them, of course, when they reach the end of the window, but can I set the maximal length to something shorter than the width of the terminal window?

Answer 1

For mutt's internal pager, that's controlled by the $wrap mutt variable.

set wrap=80

to wrap at column 80.

set wrap=0

to revert to wrapping at the width of the terminal. See also the $markers option for visual indications of wrapped lines and $smart_wrap to decide whether to wrap at word boundaries or not.

(at the : prompt or in ~/.muttrc or in macros).