Long lines

[bkmgit]

At present line breaks are converted to new paragraphs. When editing plain text files, one often wants to break lines at 70 or possibly 80 characters. Markup languages such as AsciiDoc, org-mode and Markdown use empty lines to create new paragraphs. Would a pull request enabling this as an option be considered?

[longhotsummer]

Hi @bkmgit. If I understand correctly, you're suggesting supporting "soft" line breaks, so that something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco
laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in
voluptate velit esse cillum dolore.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt
ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco
laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in
voluptate velit esse cillum dolore.

would produce XML like this:

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod...</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod...</p>

rather than a <p> tag for every line break.

The bluebell grammar tries to be non-ambiguous and to reduce variance from full-circle bluebell -> xml -> bluebell transitions. Support soft line breaks makes it less clear where a paragraph begins and ends, and the soft line breaks would be lost when converting to XML and back again.

We solve this in our editor (as do many other programming languages and editors) by using the editor's built-in soft line wraps option. Most editors can visually wrap a line without introducing line breaks, such as like this:

That is our suggested fix for this, and we have no plans to support soft line breaks.