the readability of soft-wrapped text

i think there's something important that's usually missed when discussing soft-wrapped text: text width

this might just be a me thing, but i find it really unpleasant to read anything long that's all that much wider than the standard 80/72 columns that hard-wrapped text is usually at. *something* between the person writing the text and the medium where it's being displayed should do this width-limiting, and when all the tooling for viewing text is built on the assumption that that'll happen as the text is written, it means that soft-wrapped text is really unpleasant to read

now, that doesn't mean it's impossible to get the benefits of soft-wrapping without breaking that backwards compatibility: format=flowed seems like a really good idea, and it'd be nice for it to catch on more

however, one thing that surprised me when i did an (admittedly not very thorough) look through gemini clients the other day in search of something more pleasant to use than gmnlm: none (neither) of them addressed this problem. and i do suspect this is a problem that other people have as well:

makeworld's "bye, gemini" post

among various other things, makeworld mentions that

> reading long form text in monospace really sucks, and of course that's all Amfora can do, operating in the terminal

obviously i'm not makeworld, and i can't speak for them, but i pretty much exclusively read monospaced fonts and i don't find them to be particularly unpleasant for reading long-form text. amfora, however, doesn't wrap things any narrower than the window it's given

(update 2024-01-25: i misremembered this, amfora does wrap text, the reason i didn't like it was that it really wanted to make a ~/Downloads/. this probably changes the conclusion you should draw from this post, but i don't feel like rewriting it)

i very deliberately implemented this wrapping in hxj, and when i did, it instantly made reading the quote i was typing an order of magnitude more pleasant

hxj, a cute lil tui typing test i wrote

another thing i decided to do is center the text, which i think is another underrated and good idea - it may just be that it's associated in my mind with things like reader mode, but i find that fairly narrow, centered text with a pretty large font size is a very straightforward way to significantly improve the readability of long-form text

i threw together a pretty hacky fork of adnano's astronaut, which limits text to 80 columns and centers it, and i've been finding it much more pleasant than gmnlm, which i used earlier

my astronaut fork, with centered and narrower text, along with a other minor improvements i found myself wanting