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the most basic ability of e-mail programs was and still is do decently send and display pure text messages in a monospaced font
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I enthusiastically agree -- but only with the two parts of your statement taken separately from each other: "display pure text messages" and "monospaced font".
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We had that before some newfagled nonsense known as rich text was even invented
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Ah, so you're proposing to go back to early 80-ies (before the first DOS version of Word, and ChiWriter...)
Fine with me. I'll change all of Aqua's screen layouts to fit on an fixed 80x25 character grid, and it's going to be white on blue throughout (like Norton Commander).
Seriously:
- Aqua is perfectly capable of displaying plain text messages without newfangled formatting, just not always in a mono font.
- The primary use case for mono font is for viewing computer generated information (logs, etc.), often with tables or indentation that assume fixed character widths. This, to me, is reason enough to turn off line wrapping -- with line wrapping, such formatted text becomes unreadable.
So the choice is between -- 1) an improvement on something that already works (use line wrapping when using mono font) vs. 2) completely destroying the usefulness of mono font with a fairly broad, different, but still valid use case (computer generated logs, tables, and similar).