MD013: Automatically fix line length

[PhilipNelson5]

When rule MD013/line-length is enabled and markdownlint is fixing rule violations, it would be helpful if it could reflow a multiline paragraph. This would greatly improve productivity when editing paragraphs broken at a specific column.

[DavidAnson]

This is a reasonable request, but it is not practical within the current constraints of the fix system. It’s also much more invasive than I think I’m comfortable with.

[PhilipNelson5]

That's fair, I have no idea what it would take to implement this. For anyone else looking for this feature, in vim gqip will format a paragraph and reflow it according to your configured textwidth. You still have to do it by hand on a paragraph by paragraph basis but it's far less tedious than reflowing the lines manually.

[DavidAnson]

Just to leave a note for anyone else who might look at this, there are two notable challenges that spring to mind:

Rule violations that offer a fix are only able to target a single line for edits. Reflow would typically involve multiple edits spanning multiple lines that need to be coordinated with each other. Improving the API is something I will do eventually, but it's not enough.

Applying multiple fixes at once works today by carefully ordering them so that they don't overlap or interfere with each other. That may not be possible with a paragraph reflow, so bulk fix operations may fail more often if reflow were attempted.