Firestorm - Breaking up huge walls of text.

[Kitty Aeghin]

So, I'm not sure if there's no option, or I'm just blind, but, I can't see to find an option to break up huge walls of text that I sent in IM's. Local Chat breaks it up, but, IM's just get sent as one huge wall. I'm sure there a setting to change this, but, I can't seem to find it, and Google is no help either.

[animats]

It's an interesting problem. What should text chat look like?

IPhone style?

 

MMO style?

The problem is getting chat in front of the user without using up too much screen space. SL has so much info to put on screen.

One option might be phone-like chat with truncation, so you get something like iPhone style, but truncated:

    I have a lot to talk about today, and so I ....

and you can mouse over it to see the full text. Or not. Systems which work that way tend to encourage short messages.

[Gabriele Graves]

9 hours ago, Kitty Aeghin said:

So, I'm not sure if there's no option, or I'm just blind, but, I can't see to find an option to break up huge walls of text that I sent in IM's. Local Chat breaks it up, but, IM's just get sent as one huge wall. I'm sure there a setting to change this, but, I can't seem to find it, and Google is no help either.

CTRL+P, go to Chat and then choose the "Chat Windows" tab and then uncheck the option called "Use V1 style chat headers".

[Qie Niangao]

I thought this might be about embedding newlines and/or blank lines in chat and IM text. They're preserved when contained in text that's pasted into the chat text entry area, and Firestorm seems to allow typing Ctrl-Shift-Enter to insert a newline without sending the text; I haven't found a way to do that with Catznip nor the Linden viewer.

[Kitty Aeghin]

11 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

CTRL+P, go to Chat and then choose the "Chat Windows" tab and then uncheck the option called "Use V1 style chat headers".

I don't have that turned on, actually. That's one of the first thing I tried. It just makes it a lot messier overall. Nothing really leaps out at me, sadly.

[Kitty Aeghin]

OK. I went back in my chat history and got references.

Here is the IM chat and how it looks.

Here is local and how I want it to look.

I'm just trying to make my IM chat automatically separate walls 'o text. I've attached my chat window settings under preferences. Maybe there's something obvious I'm missing.

[Qie Niangao]

Maybe others can make sense of those imgur images, but for me they obscure the one thing I was wondering: what is it that you expect should break up the "wall of text" that isn't doing so now? Is it that separate IM messages should get a line break but don't? I mean... if you resize to a different width an IM history window with a bunch of separate messages, do no line breaks happen, it just word-wraps the entire IM history, all the messages in history combined in one long line? (If so... I mean, like individual message timestamps just appear wherever they land in the middle of the line?)

Or is something else expected to appear as line breaks in the text?

[Rowan Amore]

Hit enter now and then.

[Solar Legion]

What you are seeing is normal IM behavior and has been the normal behavior for as long as I have been using Second Life, with no way to change it either.

Local Chat has an automatic cutoff point wherein it automatically splits a longer message up - much like AOL (and other, older services) did, even if you used third party tools to allow you to type more text than the normal entry box allowed for. The Instant Message system in Second Life has no such function.

So if you want such line breaks, do as Rowan said above and actually hit enter every now and again.

[Kyrie Deka]

7 hours ago, Kitty Aeghin said:

I'm just trying to make my IM chat automatically separate walls 'o text. I've attac

 

On 3/12/2021 at 1:42 PM, Qie Niangao said:

thought this might be about embedding newlines and/or blank lines in chat and IM text. They're preserved when contained in text that's pasted into the chat text entry area, and Firestorm seems to allow typing Ctrl-Shift-Enter to insert a newline without sending the text;

 

Is it that you are typing long commentary e.g. in notepad, Word, etc., and then copy/pasting into chat?

I was very happy Qie shared about the Control-Shift-Enter thing in Firestorm. News to me and it works great.  Does that not insert a line break for you in Firestorm, where you want your reader to know you took a breath?  

I suspect you are looking for an automated setting that just knows when to do it.  Which if so takes us back to hit enter when you take a breath... 

Are those not working?

 

Edited March 15, 2021 by Kyrie Deka

[Rowan Amore]

9 minutes ago, Kyrie Deka said:

 

 

Is it that you are typing long commentary e.g. in notepad, Word, etc., and then copy/pasting into chat?

 

 

This would actually be the only way I could imagine you could create breaks in IM.  Type everything onto a notecard, including breaks for paragraphs or double lines between different paragraphs then copy and paste into your IM window.

[Solar Legion]

34 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

This would actually be the only way I could imagine you could create breaks in IM.  Type everything onto a notecard, including breaks for paragraphs or double lines between different paragraphs then copy and paste into your IM window.

Control (CTRL) + Shift + Enter - as noted in two of the above posts - does actually force such a break if using Firestorm. The trick is remembering to do it.

[Kitty Aeghin]

On 3/15/2021 at 7:50 AM, Solar Legion said:

Control (CTRL) + Shift + Enter - as noted in two of the above posts - does actually force such a break if using Firestorm. The trick is remembering to do it.

 

Huh! Well, I'll have to do that, then. I'll.... probably remember. Maybe.