How can a paragraph be reformatted in Notepad++?

Question

How can I reformat a paragraph in Notepad++?

In UltraEdit I can select one or more long lines and reformat the paragraph to the set right margin (e.g. 60 or 80) by menu command Format/Reformat Paragraph, keyboard shortcut Ctrl + T. Note that it is hard formatting (inserting line ends), not how the document is displayed in the editor.

How can the equivalent be done in Notepad++?

Answer 1

It's sort of weird.

If you just want to wrap a paragraph at 72 characters you can just go to TextFX>TextFX Edit>ReWrap Text to (Clipboard or 72) width. Which will re-wrap your selected text to 72 characters.

If you want a 61 or 87 character wrap however, you need to copy the text "61" into your clipboard and then do the same thing (TextFX>TextFX Edit>ReWrap Text to (Clipboardor 72) width).

I'm sure Don HO would be interested in a patch for some TextFX Reformat Paragraph stuff, if you were so inclined.

Answer 2

This can now be done (at least in v5.9.8) via the combination of some commands in the Edit menu. Edit > Line Operations > Split Lines will insert a hard wrap at the width of the window. The hotkey for this is Ctrl-I. Edit > Line Operations > Join Line will join lines and has a hotkey of Ctrl-J.

So for a paragraph on one line, if you want to wrap at 60 or 80, resize your window to 60 or 80 characters wide, select the line you would like to hard-wrap, and hit Ctrl-I.

Alternatively, if your paragraph was already formatted to a different width, select all the lines of the paragraph and hit Ctrl-J. Then follow the aforementioned steps and you'll have a newly formatted paragraph!