Intermediate Vim tips

I highly highly recommend always using a linter/formatter that just fixes this for you

Completely agree. I used to use ag, but its handling of .gitignore files is buggy and often returns a lot more results than it should. Switching to ripgrep made a pretty significant difference for me.

Yup: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/ripgrep-is-now-the-standard-te...

This assumes that code should be read as prose. I posit that code should be skimmed, then the eye can track right if the code is relevant to the task at hand. This is all subjective, which is why I feel soft-wrapping is appropriate as it allows the coder to decide their preference.

> What does help is creating indented blocks where it feels right

Over the years, I've come to believe that using a hanging indent for alignment is actually better in terms of readability as opposed to aligning at a column after the opening parenthesis, brace, or bracket. It's also easier to type as well even if the editor doesn't provide an auto-indent facility (or if it's not configured correctly for some reason) since you only have to press TAB the same number of times to correctly position each formal parameter in the function definition.

As a side benefit, it also takes care of any alignment issues regardless of whether one uses tabs or spaces.

> and letting other lines just naturally be long.

Using the language's feature for string concatenation still makes it as easy to read:

  some_example_code = LongTypeName(
        "just a string that happens to be long; some people introduce " +
        "acceptable percentages of string literals for long lines, but it's " +
        "really not necessary. let word wrap take care of it!")

Another benefit of doing this is that it makes a unified diff and side-by-side diffs easier to read. Contrast the wrapped version when I add another sentence to the end of your example:

  diff --git a/tmp/wrapped b/tmp/wrapped
  index 972537b..27e3e31 100644
  --- a/tmp/wrapped
  +++ b/tmp/wrapped
  @@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
     some_example_code = LongTypeName(
           "just a string that happens to be long; some people introduce " +
           "acceptable percentages of string literals for long lines, but it's " +
  -        "really not necessary. let word wrap take care of it!")
  +        "really not necessary. let word wrap take care of it! Though unified " +
  +        "and side-by-side diffs may be more difficult to read")

versus the unwrapped one:

  diff --git a/tmp/unwrapped b/tmp/unwrapped
  index 284ef1e..db47f46 100644
  --- a/tmp/unwrapped
  +++ b/tmp/unwrapped
  @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
     some_example_code = LongTypeName(
  -      "just a string that happens to be long; some people introduce acceptable percentages of string literals for long lines, but it's really not necessary.  let word wrap take care of it!")
  +      "just a string that happens to be long; some people introduce acceptable percentages of string literals for long lines, but it's really not necessary.  let word wrap take care of it! Though unified and side-by-side diffs may be more difficult to read")

With the wrapped version, you can more easily see what I added to the end of the line in your example. In the unwrapped example, I most likely would have to either scroll horizontally to read the entire line. If the line is soft-wrapped, then I would have to realize that the second line is part of the previous line and not a different context line (soft-wrapping is simulated by hard-wrapping right after the "for long lines," comma and the space after "difficult to " based on how blockquoted text appears a rendered comment):

  diff --git a/tmp/unwrapped b/tmp/unwrapped
  index 284ef1e..db47f46 100644
  --- a/tmp/unwrapped
  +++ b/tmp/unwrapped_more
  @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
     some_example_code = LongTypeName(
  -      "just a string that happens to be long; some people introduce acceptable percentages of string literals for long lines,
  but it's really not necessary.  let word wrap take care of it!")
  +      "just a string that happens to be long; some people introduce acceptable percentages of string literals for long lines,
  but it's really not necessary.  let word wrap take care of it! Though unified and side-by-side diffs may be more difficult to
  read")