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On hardwrap

Posted at 2020-08-29

This is my first gemlogpost written from phone! I ssh from phone to my Orange Pi from which I ssh to tanelorn.city. The input lag is noticeable but bearable, I guess.

Post about the Orange Pi

Anyway, today's topic is controversial. Here's my opinion:

Hardwrap should be avoided.

The only reason you need for that is different screen sizes. It hurts me to read all those carefully 80-cut emails in proportional font. Especially on the phone. Lines have different lengths and confuse me.

The best thing about gemtext is that paragraphs must be written on one line. Not only it's easier to parse, it also makes editing really accessible! For example, I'm typing this text in a 36-char-column terminal and it's easy! I also edit gemtext in web browser in MycorrhizaWiki-running wikis quite a lot. How hard it would be to maintain precise hardwrap there!

No-hardwrap makes both reading and writing easier. All you need is softwrap.

You may ask: ‘But what about code?’. Well, I tend to keep most of my lines less than 80 chars but I do not force it. Some lines can be longer without any problems. By the way, I have 3 columns of files opened in my text editor all the time. My screen fits 3 80-char windows just well.

I recommend you trying to keep your code lines shorter than 80 chars too. But don't get fanatic.

I hope I convinced you that hardwrap is not needed.

Reply from Sandra

Subject: hardwrap, easy?
From:    sandra.snan@idiomdrottning.org
To:      bouncepaw2@ya.ru

Hardwrap is definitely harder to write (especially with line-oriented editors like ed) but there are apps that can convert hardwrap to gem style and I'm grateful for them! So, uh, that's even _more_ of an argument in favor of gem's softwrapping style: even for those of us who think it's hard to produce, it's possible via "un-hardwrapping" apps.

Besides being hard to deal with for line editors like ed, sometimes it can be hard to maintain the softwrapped file as it passes through a bunch of Unix weirdness. For example, I have an auto-hard-wrapper on my mail-sending app (but I disabled it for these two emails as a courtesy to you of course).