[psychometry]

But other text editors handle long lines perfectly well. I don't think other developers' choice of tools should dictate coding styles.

I exclude the tab/spaces debate from this because it has ramifications outside of mere stylistic concerns.

[scott_karana]

There are only two possible ways to deal with long lines extending past the edge of the window.

1. Scroll off the side of the window

Pain in the ass. Ever try diffing a file, and had to scroll?

2. Wrap

Also a pain in the ass. Formatting alignment, confusion over where important linebreaks are, etc.

[roryokane]

3. Wrap, and use a good editor

Many editors don’t fully support soft wrapping, sadly. But if you’re lucky enough to use an editor that includes the necessary features, there are no problems with soft wrapping. Soft wrapping has the advantage that you never have to manually re-wrap a line. These editor features make soft wrapping useable:

Display noneditable symbols at wrap points to mark them as nonimportant linebreaks. In Vim, `set showbreak=->` to display “->” at wrapped lines. Emacs supports putting arrow symbols in the “fringe”. Visual Studio has a preference to enable this.

Indent wrapped lines at the same indentation as the start of the line, optionally plus extra indentation. Vim does not support this but there is a patch for Vim that makes this enable-able with `set breakindent`. Coda supports it fully, with customizable extra indentation. This is the least-supported, most-important feature of making wrapping useable.

Separate logical-line movement and visual-line movement. Pretty much every editor supports this. Logical-line movement is really only necessary in macros, anyway. In Vim, it’s j/k (or -/<Enter>) vs gj/gk. In Sublime Text, it’s up/down vs option-up/option-down (or some combination like that).

[scott_karana]

I've used everything you mentioned except the Emacs one.

They definitely help. I just find it inconvenient to need to scroll, and sometimes arrows don't fit my usage case..

Not the editor's fault in either instance, of course. :-)