Good question. When I do a diff from within emacs, using ediff, it "just works" -- diffs are shown side-by-side w/ the same wrapping applied. (Ediff is also goo

Good question. When I do a diff from within emacs, using ediff, it "just works" -- diffs are shown side-by-side w/ the same wrapping applied. (Ediff is also good at showing you what changed within the line.) If I'm diffing in an external tool (like gitx, or just on the command line), then I just see (possibly) long lines. So far, it hasn't been an issue for me. Obviously, diff, as a line-oriented protocol, breaks down as lines get really long -- but it's still just code, so it's not like my lines are ever insanely-long. :) I also use a mode that highlights my current (physical) line in the file, so I still tend to have a very good sense of what the physical line in the file is, despite the wrapped visual display. E.g., http://imgur.com/a/wAXHJ http://imgur.com/a/wAXHJ One of the oft-touted benefits of wrapping lines at (say) 80 chars is it makes it easy to do side-by-side viewing of files -- using dynamic wrapping gives you this same benefit, but even more so, since you can heads-up different files at whatever width your current display happens to have. (Or however many files you want to have side-by-side.) Also, there's a nice side-benefit to diffs, which is you don't get the noise that comes from a change that forces a manual rewrapping -- e.g., maybe I decide my variable "id" was too generic, so I change it to "frobnackId", but then this pushes some function call over the 80-character limit. If I'm manually rewrapping, I get a weird diff of multiple lines changing over the rewrap. (On the other hand, a definite down-side is if you do find yourself using an editor that can't wrap nicely, code with long lines can be quite annoying.)