[kijin]

I've never seen nano on any popular Linux distro hard-wrap long lines by default. Yes, it's controlled by a setting, and some people turn it on for some reason, but I just confirmed it's off by default (no need for any command-line flag) in both CentOS and Ubuntu. You might have been burned by a setting left behind by someone with a weird taste.

[magicalhippo]

I learned to always, always use -w back around y2k, when my buddy taught me Gentoo. IIRC he had gotten his firewall config messed up at some point, or similar, due to forgetting that.

These days I'm still too scared of accidentally messing something up due to not passing -w, so I just do it. It's in my muscle memory after all so doesn't take much effort.