Reflow paragraph functionality

[Laisvunas]

Komodo Edit from www.activestate.com has a nice feature called "Reflow paragraph". It works as follows:

1) as in WeBuilder you can set in Preferences how many characters will span vertical line which indicates right margin (e.g. 80 characters)

2) then you can select a section of code which is left-aligned, click "Reflow paragraph" and that section will be reflowed so that it fits within vertical line.

This feature is really handy when you edit html: there are quite often cases when you should deal with chunks of text which are not divided into lines and are hardly manageable without dividing them into lines. Dividing larger chunks of text into lines manually is tedious and Reflow paragraph functionality is a great help in such situations.

[fuzzylogic]

yes, there are certain scenarios where this would be helpful. but it really goes along with the question about a code beautifier.


I initially voted no to the idea of a code beautifier, because all of my code is formatted fine as I write it. and I figure that you have quite a back log of more important projects.

But... I am currently evaluating a code library written by someone else. Although it is open source, they none-the-less ran it through a code compacter such that the entire javascript program in on a single line with no whitespace or line breaks. thus making it virtually unreadable.

To just randomly reflow the code based on character count is not that helpful, you would still need to rework it by hand. For just plain text you could get away with it as long as you respect white space and don't break in the middle of words. but I am not telling you anything that you don't already know.

[Laisvunas]

It seems to me that the question about Reflow paragraph functionality should not necessarily go along with the question about a code beautifier.

I agree that in some sense applying Reflow paragraph you beautify the code, but Reflow paragraph functionality is much simpler and more limited that Code beautifier functionality. When you beautify the code, you should set tens of options; Reflow paragraph has only one option - how many characters will span vertical line which indicates right margin. You can apply code beautifier against any code, but Reflow paragraph is used against plain text or against the code which is within <p> tags.

The only implementation of Reflow paragraph functionality I know is in Komodo Edit and it is implemented without tying it with any more advanced Code beautifier features.

I think that implementing Reflow paragraph functionality as a part of Code beautifier functionality would result in a more complicated interface and less usable feature. So, it seems to me that it would be best to have both Reflow paragraph and Code beautifier as separate features of WeBuilder.

[fuzzylogic]

okay, I basically agree. for plain text only it would be helpful to do a simple word wrap. many programs have this type of functionality.

The point I was trying to make, but did not do a very good job of it -- is that if you do arbitrary word wrapping of code (versus text) then you run a high risk of breakage. thus the need of applying intelligence to the wrapping vis a vis a code beautifier.

Probably both could be useful.

The inverse could also be nice to have too, when you are finished with creating a program, you could squish it all down to a single line.... but typically this is done by a separate obfusticator tool.

[blank]

I would like to see a plain text reflow function as well. Would be handy, definitely.

[Laisvunas]

Recently discovered that PSPad Editor also has paragraph reflow functionality. In this editor it is called "Reformat paragraph".

So, at least two best freeware editors - Komodo Edit and PSPad Editor has this functionality. We need it in WeBuilder too!

Hey, Gatis, what ideas have members of the dev team about this?

[Gatis]

Thanks, this is an interesting idea, but we really have not considered this, as it has turned up only lately.
I think we won't be able to add it in nearest time, but will not forget this idea.