With emacs how can I easily go from this:
to this (has nice indentation and fill-paragraph):
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Sign up to join this communityWrapping the paragraphs is simple: C-x h M-q
(mark the whole buffer, fill paragraphs).
Adding the bullets is not a built-in capability in text-mode, but can be accomplished a few ways. You could record a macro to add the bullet and format the paragraph, then apply that to each line. Or you could use query/replace to add the bullet to the beginning of every paragraph, then fill the whole buffer.
Here's a custom function that implements that last approach:
(defun bullet-and-fill ()
(interactive)
(goto-char (point-min))
(replace-regexp "^\\(\\w\\)" "* \\1") ; add bullet to lines with text
(mark-whole-buffer)
(fill-paragraph nil t))