Word Wrap & Reflow

Paste any block of prose — an email, a README, a long paragraph from a document — and reflow it to a chosen line width. The inverse operation, unwrap, collapses hard-wrapped lines back into single-line paragraphs (handy when you’re cleaning up an email quoted at 72 characters). Pick a width, optionally indent, justify, and break long words. Nothing leaves your browser.

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Wrap vs unwrap

Wrap takes continuous prose and breaks it into lines that don’t exceed the requested width, preserving paragraph breaks (blank lines) and any list-style prefixes (bullets, numbered items, indented blocks, quoted-email > chains). Unwrap does the opposite: it collapses runs of hard-wrapped lines back into a single-line paragraph. Use it to clean up text quoted at 72 characters by a mail client.

Indents

First-line indent adds the given number of spaces at the start of the very first line of each paragraph. Hanging indent adds spaces at the start of every subsequent line. Combine the two for poetry-style formatting: first-line = 0, hanging = 4 puts the first line flush left and every continuation line indented four characters in.

Justify

When on, every line of a paragraph except the last is space-padded to exactly the chosen width, with the largest gaps on the left (left-justified flush). The last line of the paragraph is left as-is. Justification respects indents — the indent is part of the width, not added on top of it.

Break long words

When on (the default), a single word wider than the target width is split on a character boundary so the line fits. Without this, an over-long word would silently widen the line. Turn it off to preserve long URLs, hex dumps, or identifiers verbatim.

Preserved prefixes

The tool recognises and preserves these prefixes on every line, treating each as the start of its own sub-paragraph so the prefix stays put while the body wraps:

  • >, >>, >>> — quoted email chains
  • - , * , + — bullets
  • 1. , 2. , … — numbered lists (1–3 digit indices)
  • ## / ### — Markdown headings (kept on one line)
  • Two or more leading spaces — indented blocks

A single leading space is not a prefix — it’s treated as stray indentation and removed.

About this tool

Word Wrap reformats a block of text to a target column width, breaking long lines and re-flowing the paragraphs. It is useful when you have prose that was hard-wrapped at a different width (a 100-column terminal capture, an email quoted at 72 columns) and you want it re-flowed to 80 columns for a code review or a manuscript. The tool respects your existing paragraph breaks and does not merge them, and it never breaks inside a word — it breaks on whitespace. Long URLs and runs of punctuation are passed through unbroken.

When to use it

  • Re-flowing an email reply that was hard-wrapped at 72 columns to 80
  • Cleaning pasted text from a PDF that broke lines mid-sentence
  • Re-wrapping a code comment block to match a project's line-width convention
  • Preparing prose for a column-limited print layout

When not to use it

  • You need to keep markdown structure intact — wrapping a Markdown file naively can break lists, tables, and code fences. Wrap only the prose sections
  • You need to wrap code — use a code formatter (prettier, gofmt) that knows your language's syntax
  • You need soft-wrap on display only — that is what CSS `word-wrap: break-word` does at render time, with no reformatting

Frequently asked questions

Does it break words?

No. It only breaks on whitespace, so words are never split mid-syllable. If a single word is longer than the target width, that word will exceed the width on its own line — wrapping cannot fix a single over-long token.

Does it preserve blank lines?

Yes. Paragraphs separated by one or more blank lines stay separated. The tool re-flows inside each paragraph but never merges paragraphs.

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