Reducing the Line Width in Kate

Traditional Unix text editors failed to keep up with the times when we made the switch to widescreen monitors. Geany, for instance, does not offer any options to reduce line width. You’re either going to insert line breaks manually or you’re going to be writing to the edge of the screen. Manual line breaks don’t always work, with one example being the inside of a quoted string, and it’s a “write one time thing” because of the difficulty of making changes. A sort of acceptable solution is to put a sidebar on both sides of your document.

I was pleased to find a real fix for this in Kate. In Settings, under Appearance, you can enable “Dynamic Word Wrap” and “Wrap dynamic at static word wrap marker”. Then under Editing, set “Wrap words at” to the value you want. Don’t enable static word wrap, just set your line length. I use something greater than the default of 80.