I like using emacs to write, I also like having the text I write to look like nicely formatted paragraphs, so that it looks like a nice column of text. By default text editor won't really do that and extend to the available width and either soft wrap or overflow.
I took the habit of formatting paragraphs with vim and emacs manually,
respecticvely with gq and M-q, but this approach has many issues, main two.
The first one being that it's not really portable, if you want to paste in
another editor, you're bringing in a column of texts with newline characters
and it might break whenyou do so. This happened to me when copying markdown
content to dev.to.
The second one being that it requires a lot of manual formatting, if you edit
anexisting paragraph, you have to reformat it manually.
I recently realized that the visual-line-mode in emacs was really close to
what I wanted, the text looks like it's formatted with newlines, you even get
shortcuts to go to the beginning of the line, as if it was a new line (and to
the end of the line) but each paragraph is just one line of text when it's
save. The only issue I had is that it takes the whole width available by
default. Not a huge problem, I can split my panes or resize my window, but not
what I wanted.
Enter, visual-fill-column, and it does exactly what I want!
I now have the following lines in my emacs config file:
(add-hook 'gfm-mode-hook #'visual-line-mode)
(add-hook 'visual-line-mode-hook #'visual-fill-column-mode)The first one enables visual-line-mode when I am editing a markdown file, the
second one enables visual-fill-column-mode when I am in visual-line-mode.
Finally, make sure that word-wrap is set to t so that lines look nice!
And that's it!
