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⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
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i think there's something important that's usually missed when discussing soft-wrapped text: text width
this might just be a me thing, but i find it really unpleasant to read anything long that's all that much wider than the standard 80/72 columns that hard-wrapped text is usually at. *something* between the person writing the text and the medium where it's being displayed should do this width-limiting, and when all the tooling for viewing text is built on the assumption that that'll happen as the text is written, it means that soft-wrapped text is really unpleasant to read
now, that doesn't mean it's impossible to get the benefits of soft-wrapping without breaking that backwards compatibility: format=flowed seems like a really good idea, and it'd be nice for it to catch on more
however, one thing that surprised me when i did an (admittedly not very thorough) look through gemini clients the other day in search of something more pleasant to use than gmnlm: none (neither) of them addressed this problem. and i do suspect this is a problem that other people have as well:
makeworld's "bye, gemini" post
among various other things, makeworld mentions that
reading long form text in monospace really sucks, and of course that's all Amfora can do, operating in the terminal
obviously i'm not makeworld, and i can't speak for them, but i pretty much exclusively read monospaced fonts and i don't find them to be particularly unpleasant for reading long-form text. amfora, however, doesn't wrap things any narrower than the window it's given
(update 2024-01-25: i misremembered this, amfora does wrap text, the reason i didn't like it was that it really wanted to make a ~/Downloads/. this probably changes the conclusion you should draw from this post, but i don't feel like rewriting it)
i very deliberately implemented this wrapping in hxj, and when i did, it instantly made reading the quote i was typing an order of magnitude more pleasant
hxj, a cute lil tui typing test i wrote
another thing i decided to do is center the text, which i think is another underrated and good idea - it may just be that it's associated in my mind with things like reader mode, but i find that fairly narrow, centered text with a pretty large font size is a very straightforward way to significantly improve the readability of long-form text
i threw together a pretty hacky fork of adnano's astronaut, which limits text to 80 columns and centers it, and i've been finding it much more pleasant than gmnlm, which i used earlier