Can you detail a bit more what you mean by extraneous material? Is it something like "you now
also need tools that can do soft-wrapping"? Even if that's the case, I think it is easier to wrap a text than to unwrap it (programmatically). So, if you need hard-wrapping, you can just do it.
Wrapping is just as simple as; `fold -s -w 80 input.txt`
Unwrapping usually turns out to be harder according to my experiences. [1]
> You also can't grep for things "at the beginning of the line", which is often an important indicator. When I did a lot of plain C programming, I would put function names at the start of a line, below their return type to make it easy to grep for a function definition, rather than just uses.
I see what you mean. But I don’t think your approach conflicts with my recommendation for soft-wrapping. You can still soft-wrap regular text files while choosing to separate certain lines of code for clarity. What you’re doing might not even be considered "hard-wrapping" in the typical sense—it's not like you're breaking a 240-character line into multiple lines. You're simply formatting the definition in a way that suits your style, and it's perfectly ok!
For the last one, you can simply use `git diff --word-diff`. Also, platforms like GitHub already highlight word-based diffs, so it usually is very easy to spot the changes.
[1]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227848
Wrapping is just as simple as; `fold -s -w 80 input.txt`
Unwrapping usually turns out to be harder according to my experiences. [1]
> You also can't grep for things "at the beginning of the line", which is often an important indicator. When I did a lot of plain C programming, I would put function names at the start of a line, below their return type to make it easy to grep for a function definition, rather than just uses.
I see what you mean. But I don’t think your approach conflicts with my recommendation for soft-wrapping. You can still soft-wrap regular text files while choosing to separate certain lines of code for clarity. What you’re doing might not even be considered "hard-wrapping" in the typical sense—it's not like you're breaking a 240-character line into multiple lines. You're simply formatting the definition in a way that suits your style, and it's perfectly ok!
For the last one, you can simply use `git diff --word-diff`. Also, platforms like GitHub already highlight word-based diffs, so it usually is very easy to spot the changes.
[1]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227848