[OS X TeX] wrap [was: migrating from emacs...]

[Enrico Franconi]

On 6 Feb 2012, at 09:09, Joachim Kock wrote:

> - with long soft-wrapped lines, go-to-line functionality like
> typing 'e' at a tex error, is less efficient;

True. I guess that this is due to the fact that LaTeX is a product of a century ago: the LaTeX parser knows where the error is, but decided to report only the line number due to the habits of non-window-based systems.
To ease the task, in Latexian (long) lines with an error are marked directly at their beginning with a red exclamation mark.

> - diff becomes considerably less useful when differences are
> detected inside a 700-char line forming a paragraph instead of
> in a 70-char line;

Uh? Modern diff renderers work at the level of characters, so I don't see the problem here.

> - comment chars work on such "paragraphs" instead of on lines,
> and if one day the file is hardwrapped (e.g. by TeXShop's
> shift-cmd-H, or by an email transmission), it can really be
> screwed up, since a comment that used to affect 700 chars now
> suddenly only affects the first 70;

This is true anyway: you don't want *ever* to hard-wrap a LaTeX file with a LaTeX-unaware hard-wrapper!

> - similarly, indentation affects only the first visual line of
> the long line, hence the visual aid provided by indentation
> (automatic in many editors), for example in enumerate or theorem
> environments, is watered down;

Not true in Latexian, where soft-wrapped lines are indented as well.

> - the two previous points are aggravated in editors (such as
> TeXShop) where you can't visually see the distinction between a
> soft and a hard line break, so you won't know in advance the
> scope of your comment or indent operation.  In short: what you
> see is not what you have.

Not true in Latexian, where it is easy to see the distinction between soft and hard wrapped lines.

> In fact even the typing process of soft-wrapped text has an
> element of confusion: when typing inside a long-line paragraph,
> the later text inside the paragraph dances around on the screen,
> and the sentence you were starring at a moment ago at some
> position on the screen is suddenly somewhere else on the screen.

Well, in the case of hard-wrapped lines, you write and then you have to manually rewrap anyway, making your text dancing around, so it is debatable which approach is less friendly :-)

cheers
--e.