Hi all,
is the concept of use-hard-newlines still considered useful?
Just looking how to simplify fill-paragraph.
AFAICS it introduces complexity which doesn't contribute, not reallly.
I think the concept of hard newlines is useful, just like the concept of non-breaking spaces. Especially in code comments I often want a line break that is unaffected by fill-paragraph without requiring an empty line. However the current implementation is not optimal because hard newlines rely on a text property instead of a distinct character, so IIUC hard newlines will be lost when saving (except for enriched mode, which seems mostly unused these days). Instead I'd suggest that Emacs observe the LINE SEPARATOR (U+2028) and PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR (U+2029) characters: currently they are displayed as horizontal whitespace instead of line breaks, and fill-paragraph treats both like no-break spaces. Instead, fill-paragraph should treat U+2028 like a soft newline and U+2029 like a hard newline.