[jacknagel]

git-log and friends indent the commit message by four spaces on the left, so wrapping at ~72 chars gives it symmetry on 80 column terminals. By wrapping it yourself, you decide where line breaks should be, not the presentation machinery.

The optimal human-readable line length is something like 66 characters. It's much easier to quickly scan a log message that's 72 characters wide vs. one that is 200 characters wide.

[harlanlewis]

Tangent time!

"The optimal human-readable line length" isn't really something that exists, even if we make lots of assumptions about basic stuff like font size, avg word length, and color contrast.

Here's a quick study on the reading speed and comprehension of character line lengths (cl) between 35 and 95 for reference: http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLeng...

- most efficient reading (speed/accuracy) at 95cl

- line length does not affect comprehension

But here's the head spinner:

- 60% _preferred_ either 35cl or 95cl

- 100% _least preferred_ 35cl (45%) or 95cl (55%)

Line length is an easy thing to assume everyone perceives the same way, but even given a consistent environment (definitely not a given in this age of increasingly diverse device dimensions) there's a wide range of preferences with little real impact on readability. Unless, of course, your assumptions about readability clash with the user's preferences or reading environment.

Put simply - make your life easy and reduce problems by just letting the user decide.

[njonsson]

Making semantic line breaks (such as for bullets) is understandable, but it still feels wrong that we’re otherwise doing the job of `fold`. I started breaking lines in commit messages because it’s convention, but I still believe this is a tooling issue.

This shell script wraps wide commit messages to the width of your console.

    GIT_PAGER="fold -s -w`stty size | awk '{print $2}'` | less" git log $@

[wnoise]

You might be interested in the program "par", which uses dynamic programming to optimize the line breaks, and can automatically handle such things as text prefixed by "> ".

http://www.nicemice.net/par/