Spool Five

Semantic Line Breaks

Semantic line breaks are a technique for structuring plain text files. They can be useful in cases where you are writing in a markup language like Markdown, html, AsciiDoc, Gemtext, and so on. These markup formats automatically join consecutive lines, so the resulting output will be rendered as a paragraph of continuous text.

For example, I am writing this note using semantic line breaks. This is what it looks like to me:

Semantic line breaks are a technique for structuring plain text files.
They can be useful in cases where you are writing in a markup language
like Markdown, html, AsciiDoc, Gemtext, and so on.
These markup formats automatically join consecutive lines,
so the resulting output will be rendered as a paragraph of continuous text.

For example, I am writing this note using semantic line breaks.
This is what it looks like to me:

The benefits of semantic line breaks are:

  1. While writing, the physical structure of the text reflects the logical structure of your points.
  2. While editing, you can easily move sentences around and quickly understand the intent of each point.
  3. If you are using a version control system like git, viewing diffs of documents is more pleasant.

To be honest, I don’t use semantic line breaks myself. However, it is something I have wanted to try get into the habit of doing for a while.

Resources:

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