Feature suggestion: Automating wrapping markdown one-sentence-per-line

[dstansby]

Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem? Please Describe

Add an automated way to wrap markdown files at 80 (@dstansby: maybe a bit more??) characters.

Suggested by @paddyroddy in #335 (comment).

Describe the Solution You'd Like

An automated way to wrap markdown files in the pre-commit config.

Describe Alternatives You've Considered

No response

Additional Context

No response

[paddyroddy]

Identified in #361 proseWrap broke things due to prettier/prettier#9232. This might be fixable by a different markdown parser, or not using the RST-like hyperlink format.

[matt-graham]

I'd vote against autowrapping Markdown. From my perspective:

• It can make minor changes lead to unnecessarily large diffs.
• It adds extra faff while editing - either you try to manually reflow text to keep to line length limit or have to apply a reformatter after making edits.
• Markdown unlike source code is generally naturally reflowable by soft wrapping as indentation is (mostly) not used to indicate structure.

[paddyroddy]

It can make minor changes lead to unnecessarily large diffs.

I actually wholeheartedly disagree with this bit. When markdown is not wrapped and someone changes a few words in a paragraph, it can be very long.

[samcunliffe]

I wrap markdown for my own stuff. But just because I quite like to cat flibble.md and read it in a terminal.
No strong opinion other than: if we do decide a policy of wrapping it should be linter-ed.

[matt-graham]

I wrap markdown for my own stuff. But just because I quite like to cat flibble.md and read it in a terminal.

You may already know but in case it's helpful: as an alternative to cat flibble.md, fmt flibble.md will display word wrapped content of flibble.md without touching file.

[dstansby]

I'm also -1 on wrapping Markdown at a fixed number of characters, and agree with reasons in #337 (comment). Generally I try and do one-sentence-per-line, for reasons outlined here: https://nick.groenen.me/notes/one-sentence-per-line/, which I think addresses #337 (comment) too, so perhaps we could look for a linter that wraps whole sentences, or just leave this as is with no automatic markdown wrapping?

[paddyroddy]

I'm also -1 on wrapping Markdown at a fixed number of characters, and agree with reasons in #337 (comment). Generally I try and do one-sentence-per-line, for reasons outlined here: nick.groenen.me/notes/one-sentence-per-line, which I think addresses #337 (comment) too, so perhaps we could look for a linter that wraps whole sentences, or just leave this as is with no automatic markdown wrapping?

@p-j-smith found some one-sentence-per-line linter, but it was impractically slow

[matt-graham]

Generally I try and do one-sentence-per-line, for reasons outlined here: https://nick.groenen.me/notes/one-sentence-per-line/, which I think addresses #337 (comment) too, so perhaps we could look for a linter that wraps whole sentences, or just leave this as is with no automatic markdown wrapping?

One sentence per line seems a good recommendation to me - if nothing else it'll make me notice, and hopefully be more likely to fix, my tendency towards overly long sentences (this one being a case in point 😅).

[dstansby]

Is consensus here that we

• would like to wrap markdown at one sentence per line, but there's no technical solution we can find at the moment
• don't want to wrap at a hard character limit

? If so I'll edit the title of the issue and we can keep on the lookout for a one-sentence-per-line linter

[samcunliffe]

Not sure if it helps us in the quest for one-sentence-per-line but..

• https://sembr.org/

Is a thing.

[samcunliffe]

Was this what Paul found?
https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/sentences-per-line

Looks to be a markdownlint rule that we could test.

[paddyroddy]

Was this what Paul found? JoshuaKGoldberg/sentences-per-line

Looks to be a markdownlint rule that we could test.

Just trying to find what it was

[paddyroddy]

Found it! Yes it was that one, see discussion here https://github.com/UCL-MIRSG/MIRSG/issues/191 (screenshot, as you might not have access)

I ended up using Prose Wrap from prettier