> Nowadays of course there's no real reason to use for fmt, as text > editors now do that stuff for you.
That is where you are mistaken. You are thinking of a human sitting in front of a modern IDE. But in 2026, the most active "users" of classic CLI utilities like grep, sed, awk, and fmt are **AIs**. The reason AI "advertises" fmt is because it expects a standard system utility to perform its documented function. In fact, that is exactly how I discovered this piece of "legacy" junk. I tasked an AI with a formatting job, saw a mangled, broken output, and realized the AI had naively trusted 'fmt' to handle 21st-century text. When an AI agent processes data via a shell, it doesn't have an IDE. It relies on the core building blocks of the system. If those blocks are broken or stuck in the 1970s, the AI's output becomes a mess for the human recipient. If 'fmt' is a "useless program" that only exists because it's a "hassle to remove," then why is it still being shipped in 2025/2026 as a functional part of GNU Coreutils? Keeping a broken tool in the box just because "it's a hassle to take it out" is exactly the kind of technical debt that makes modern systems feel like they are built on quicksand. If it's a corpse, bury it. If it's a tool, fix its 14-year-old Unicode blindness. Best regards, A human who has to clean up after 'fmt' and its 7-bit dreams.
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