3 ms·
A bit of an educated guess but I believe the answer stems from markdown originally targeting terminals, which would line wrap but not word wrap. So you could ge
by laumars 8y ago
A bit of an educated guess but I believe the answer stems from markdown originally targeting terminals, which would line wrap but not word wrap. So you could get ugly output like this:
hello, wor
ld!
(albeit this is assuming the terminal is only 10 characters wide but I hope you get the point)
So it used to be common for developers and sysadmins to manually wrap to 80 characters (a habit I still regularly catch myself doing even now). Obviously with GUI readers and variable-width characters, you wouldn't want that 80 character manual wrap honoured.
- jgtrosh 8y agoWrapping sentences into short functional parts (motivated by more or less arbitrary limits like 80 characters) helps having easily editable and readable text.
- laumars 8y agoApologies but I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you able to elaborate?
- CiaranMcNulty 8y agoHitting enter at the end of a line lets you manually wrap paragraphs in a way that will fit into an 80 or 120-char wide terminal. Ignoring those line breaks is desirable when reflowing the text into e.g. HTML output
- jgtrosh 8y agoAs others, I've grown accustomed to wrapping lines to fit in small terminals, and I started avoiding breaking the line randomly. Instead I try to break after self-sufficient parts of sentences so that lines flow naturally after one another. That usually means after a comma, before a connector word, or after an enumeration. It's not always possible, but I find that when I need to rewrite a sentence to be naturally breakable it usually reads better. Furthermore, each line often ends up expressing a whole idea, which means working on that idea usually translates to simple line operations, which fits nicely in an expressive text editor like Vim.