Note, line breaking does not break lines when typing adds characters before the column limit, even if that pushes characters on the line past the limit.

Why?

Its complicated, let me show why.

In the following | means the breaking column and the successive snippets separated by blank lines are the progressive results of typing the x characters.

Naive line breaking inserting a newline before the last word when the line exceeds the limit:

aaa bbb ccc|
ddd        |

xaaa bbb   |
ccc        |
ddd        |

xxxxxaaa   |
bbb        |
ccc        |
ddd        |

oops, probably wanted the sequence:

xaaa bbb   |
ccc ddd    |

xxxxxaaa   |
bbb ccc    |
ddd        |

This is called "reflow" as provided by Edit->Format->Reflow Lines/Block and is a fine thing for text files if limited to a paragraph.

But as soon as it anything other than plain text, even mostly text like markdown it can break the markup, eg consider a line containing a # character, if it happens to reflow to the start of a line suddenly your paragraph has a heading in the middle of it!

And its even worse with code, although many languages don't care about embedded line breaks most of the time, all do care inside string quotes, and there are even more subtle issues with some languages:

starting with and typing x
a = 1 + 2|

Python
xa = 1 + |
2

Go
xxxa = 1 |
+ 2      |

The python result is illegal, but more insidiously the Go example is legal, but assigns 1 to the variable and calculates the expression 2 as a separate statement that does nothing.

So since simple automatic line breaking when typing before the limit is so often wrong Geany does not provide it, although it provides the facility to break when typing past the limit when the user has immediate visibility of the result and can fix any problems. Also the user can manually apply reflow.

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