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Comment by jacoblyles | Hacker News Reader

git treats every paragraph as a single line. That seems like an annoying default for english text.

The issue is less that git treats every paragraph as a single line, and more that git treats every line as a single line and they've put the paragraphs onto one line. It turns out that LaTeX actually looks for a double line break between paragraphs, and you can insert single line breaks into paragraphs without having them appear in the output.

So what you actually want to do is put a line break after every sentence and possibly after every clause, so that in the LaTeX source diffs work sanely, while the output looks as normal.

I'd argue that what you want to do is write English language as you're accustomed. Paragraphs with multiple sentence in a single line.

What you'd like Git (or whatever your diff'ing program) to do is parse the individual sentences as individual lines for version control.

To each his own though. I have trained myself to start putting LaTeX sentences on separate lines to accomodate for this, but don't think that this is the best solution.

You also want to write English, as you normally write English.

It'd be nice to have an intermediate step that turned your LaTeX into a canonical form that works well with Git. And then when you are about to edit, converts it back into a nice-looking 80-column text file, or whatever you prefer.

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