On 23/02/09 16:11, Daniel Choi wrote:
> I've been writing my text documents in vim using hard line breaks and
> reflowing the text as needed with gqap (via a shortcut).
>
> Then I saw this blog post
>
> http://tech.geoff.me/2008/05/vim-word-processor.html
>
> and tried using Vim in a more word processor-y mode, with soft line
> wrapping.
>
> After about a week of that, I went back to the EOLs. I just liked the
> hard wrapping better, and it made my text files work better with tools
> like grep, diff, and git.
>
> I'm little sad however to see an increase in soft wrapped README files
> in software source code (particular in Ruby), which can be attributed
> I'm sure to the rise of GUI text editors like TextMate.
>
> Thoughts?
IMHO README files should be plaintext, suitable for text pagers such as
less, and that would mean hard line breaks spaced no more than 80
"virtual" characters apart. By "virtual" I mean that "wide" CJK
characters count double, and that hard tabs (if any) are worth between
one and eight "virtual characters" each.
As for writing prose in general, it all depends what file type
(technically, what MIME type) you use for it, and who/what the files are
meant for. Prose in plaintext and meant to be distributed to people on
any kind of computers should have lines no longer than 80. Plaintext
prose for your own use can be anything. I'd recommend lines short enough
for your printer (for the :hardcopy command) -- if you _have_ a printer.
For prose in HTML the length of lines in the source text mostly doesn't
matter, since spaces, tabs, and linebreaks are mostly all "whitespace".
(Exception: inside <pre></pre> tags.) For mail, it's usually regarded as
"good form" to use hard breaks at most 75 or so characters apart, though
format-flowed can be used to tell the receiving mail client that those
"short" lines should be concatenated on display. And so on.
Program _source code_ is not the same as _prose_. (Source code can be
written e.g. in C, Ada, Perl, Javascript, etc. Prose is written in
English, French, German, Chinese, Urdu, Cherokee, etc.) IMHO the length
of program source lines should depend on the language's syntax, and
there are so many different programming languages that I can't imagine
any "general" rule valid for all of them.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
Lawmakers made it obligatory for everybody to take at least one bath
each week -- on Saturday night.
[real standing law in Vermont, United States of America]
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