Why not use the markdown way to deal with long lines?


Philipp Stanner <stanner at posteo.de> writes:

> I stumbled over Gemini a while ago and today tried to setup my first
> blog post.
>
> I take issue with the fact that a paragraph has to be one long line. I
> think the markdown way is perfect: Two newlines create a paragraph.
> Period. This way, everyone can write maintaining the common width of 80
> characters, and it will still be displayed as intended.

I think the reason for this choice is due to the fact that in
text/gemini you have different kinds of lines: paragraphs, links,
quotations, items and the ``` marker to switch to verbatim.  If you add
a rule to ?join? sequential non-blank ?simple? lines into one paragraph,
it can cause weird effects.

Let?s say you change some text in the paragraph and you reformat it:
your editor may decide to break a long line so that the next now starts
with a ?*? or with a ?>??  You can change the gemtext spec again so that
items and quotation needs a blank line before but? is ugly, isn?t it?

(this point is also aggravated by the fact that it isn?t clear if a
space after ?*?, ?=>? etc. is required or not, so clients can misbehave,
at least in theory)

I am not a fan of long lines and visual folding either, but it simplify
the syntax (good for parsers) and makes it difficult *for humans* to
introduce errors in their documents.

> For the first time in a long while I started to search neovim's help to
> find out if there's any way to have long lines and still work with them
> productively. Softwrap on or off doesn't do the trick, it's rather
> annoying when you want to edit something in the mid of a huge
> paragraph. `30w cw`...
>
> My life would be more easy if I could just do what I always did and
> wrap at 80. Considering Gemini will mostly target software people, I
> think that's appropriate.
>
> But if anyone here can provide me with a clever (neovim) trick to deal
> with these long lines, I'm open to hear about it.
>
> P.

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