25.4 Emacs File Local Variables for Markdown

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If collaborating with colleagues writing Markdown documents, managed through git, you may be presented with documents that have paragraphs on a single line! This might simply be the default of some Markdown editors. An inclination might be to re-fill the paragraphs over several lines so they fit the screen. However that is not friendly in a git environment.

Instead, when editing documents with very long single line paragraphs, and to retain them, set up some Emacs configurations. By default the long lines get cut off in buffers with no line wrap. So turn on line wrap at words with M-x visual-line-mode or from the menus under Options -> Line Wrapping in This Buffer -> Word Wrap (Visual Line mode). It is also useful to introduce a very large fill column so that a M-q (which I often automatically type) does not re-wrap the line. Do this with C-u 10000 C-x f.

To have this done automatically on loading a Markdown file place this at the top of the file:

<!-- -*- fill-column: 10000; eval: (visual-line-mode t); -*- -->


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