Meaning of the mysterious thin vertical red line in commit window

Question

The TortoiseHg Commit window has a thin vertical red line in the text area where you can write your commit message:

What is the purpose and/or meaning of this line? The relevant TortoiseHg documentation comes up empty. Searching Google and Stack Overflow currently give zero results.

Is it a suggested(?) or recommended(?) place to put hard line breaks in commit messages? If so: why have such a suggestion at all, and why at that particular location?

Venetis

Answer 1

Okay, bro, it 's your personal hand-made settings (default value - unspecified)!!!

TortoiseHG - Settings - Commit

and at the bottom, when this listbox is active, you can read description and purpose of this parameter

Redeploy

Answer 2

Without knowing this platform I would say it's a text wrap marker - where text would wrap when printed as pure text to a printer. the old "standard" had a width of 80 chars (72 on some platforms) for ASCII-based documents.

The width was also relevant to pure-text document viewers who typically wrapped text at 72 or 80 chars. It was also used for terminals at the time when BBS'es was the norm (before internet became popular).

I suspect the reason is to provide backward-compatibility to the more old-school developers who might want to read this in a plain text reader and for printing (printing pure text is many times faster than formatted text which is printed as graphics, and therefor convenient when printing documentation and so forth). But this will be just a guess on my part.

Keare

Ah, does seem the red line is between 80th and 81st character, indeed. But then: why include that in a tool, anno 2012? – Venetis

I'm not sure of why, but I added a guess in my answer. – Keare

Many places have practices that say commit messages should fit in a standard terminal width. The reason is that otherwise lines either get truncated or wrapped when viewed from the command line. Wrapped messages just look a mess and can be very difficult to read. Better that the author stays to the limit, and then the messages look good on everything. – Major

Specifically: most terminal emulators will case-fold at the 80th character, which look awful if it's in the middle of a word. Wrapping, on the other hand, breaks at spaces. – Karyolysis