[chrismorgan]

  Also, reconsider column-based hard-wrapping entirely,
  and consider wrapping mostly on punctuation,
  or other reasonable opportunities when it gets a bit long
  and you don’t really want to insert punctuation.

  This is not without its drawbacks and limitations—
  most software when rewrapping won’t cope with trailing em dashes,
  and you’ll end up with extraneous spaces when the lines are merged,
  even though this is *always* how wrapping has worked around dashes.

  Over time, this will definitely influence your writing style.
  Your sense of æsthetics will push you to reword sentences,
  because otherwise the edge is too ragged for your liking,
  and at some point you’ll see a pattern in a paragraph,
  and feel an uncontrollable urge to continue it,
  and you’ll waste a bunch of time tweaking,
  and maybe no one will appreciate it.
  But you’ll appreciate it.
  It’ll be fun.
  Mostly.

  But seriously, you *will* become more aware of things like clause length,
  and your writing will probably improve.

  And after writing verbosely for a long time,
  you’ll focus on concision,
  and that’ll be another challenge.
  And it’ll be fun too.
  Mostly.

  Then probably someone will take over your pet docs project,
  and mandate an autoformatter that rewraps it to 59 columns.
  Stubbornly, in the quiet of your mind, you’ll make it work.
  It’s a greater challenge, but you won’t lack determination.
  Style guides come, and style guides go; when this one goes,
  your lines can remain the same, needing no fixing, perfect.

  —⁂—

  And really, just look at how the last paragraph of the parent comment looks,
  before and after:

      Finally, commit comments definitely should have jokes in them. This is
      actually more critical than wrapping them at 72 characters.

                                      —⁂—

      Finally, commit comments definitely should have jokes in them.
      This is actually more critical than wrapping them at 72 characters.

  Much more beautiful, is it not?

[benji-york]

You might like top's commit messages, e.g., https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/e6f22569e9db16d...

commit e6f22569e9db16dbef7d9bdee5bb41b8cb7a03ca

Author: Jim Warner <[e-mail]>

Date: Tue Jul 23 00:00:00 2024 -0500

    top: attempt once again to allow help text translation
    
    Back when our release 4.0.1 was being readied, sources
    were sent to the TP (Translation Project). However one
    person named Benno Schulenberg refused to release them
    for translation. His stated reason was the top command
    line help text which then finally included long forms.
    
    He demanded that the help text be broken into separate
    strings instead of a single large string. But, all the
    top text (some much more complex) has just one string.
    So that stated reason was, at the least, inconsistent.
    
    [ I suspect the real reason was that Mr. Schulenberg ]
    [ thought that the carefully right-justified English ]
    [ wording would also be required of translations too ]
    
    The bottom line was that Benno took it upon himself to
    change the TP motto from "you code, we translate" into
    "first we tell you how to code and then we translate".
    
    Rather than bend a knee to that despot, I disabled the
    text entirely, admittedly denying users a translation.
    Now, with this commit we enable translatable help text
    but with a hint included to ignore the justified text.
    
    Reference)s):
    . Oct, 2022 - finalized translation exclusion
    commit ab05a3785f29cc4b754e17c53bfb3d8ba054563e
    
    Signed-off-by: Jim Warner <[e-mail]>