Which text editor to add line break (not word wrap) at same column throughout source code file?

Question

I'm preparing some documentation and need to format my source code with line breaks that need to appear in column 70 throughout the file.

The text editors I have only seem to have features to word wrap the source at this column.

I'm wondering whether I need to do this manually since - because of the varying length of the last word at the right-side end of the line - the line doesn't always end at the same place.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Don't know of any editor that will do this, but you could run your files through this on the commandline:

perl -wlne'print $_ . (" " x (69-length($_)))' < infile > outfile

Or, if you're using Vim, you could select the text you want to modify in visual mode, and then type :! followed by perl -wlne'print $_ . (" " x (69-length($_)))' to pipe it through that Perl magic.

Answer 2

What operating systems are available? On OS X, I think TextWrangler has a "hard wrap" option that should do what you want.

Answer 3

I can't check it right now, but UltraEdit for Windows has a "column mode" that lets you do that kind of stuff. Not sure it can do the line breaks, but it's worth checking out (there's a trial version).

Answer 4

Certainly don't do it manually. You can do it in perl with:

perl -pe 's/(.{70})/\n$1/smg'

or you can do it in vim with:

:%s/\(.\{70\}\)/^M\1/g

(the ^M is entered with ^V-, and this will only work if there are no tabstops in the file. The tabstop issue is also true for the perl solution.)

Update: the comments are correct: this is a fairly naive approach. Vim also offers the formatexpr setting that is promising, but still doesn't seem to deal well with leading whitespace. Within vim, try (with cursor on line 1):

:set formatexpr=
:set textwidth=70
gqG

See vim's documentation on textwidth and ins-textwidth for more details.

Answer 5

VI can do this using

:set tw=69 (set the right line length)

gg (go to the top of the file)

gqG (reformat to the end)