Hot take: line wrapping sucks, readers should be wrapping lines themselves and not the writers.
@huy_ngo i agree, but wouldn't it make it hard to read in line-delimited text?
@pizza_pal That's what tools like fmt is for, if I understand your question correctly. My point is that, limiting the line width to an arbitrary number like 80 would makes it hard to read for people whose prefers it to be 70.
@huy_ngo hmm, yeah, i guess when you get XML or HTML or whatever from the network, it's just one big line anyways. or at least the message body is.
@pizza_pal I was talking about plaintext documents or emails in particular. If you just wrap the source and present to the users in auto-wrapped format then it's fine.
@huy_ngo, for plaintext documents, hard wrapping is to aid version control and CLI tools (it's drastically easier and cheaper to work on the basis of lines instead of words), so basically we're limited by the technology of our time. Documents in markup languages can be reformatted or graphically rendered when represented to users though.
Emails are a bit different. There is format=flowed, but it's only supported by like half of the email clients.
Cc: @pizza_pal
@huy_ngo and @pizza_pal, that's when we only consider some human languages in discussion mode. Poems should be soft wrapped in a special way or never at all, and code snippets (the new kind of poems) must be displayed as-is, since whitespaces play an important role in readability.
People working together must agree upon the width, some will be unhappy, but if it's not clear already, dealing with code on a phone screen is good for neither eyes nor mental health.
