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Marijn
Asked: 2020-10-15 00:54:20 +0800 CST

Line break on symbol shows hyphen

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Since the upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.1 (from 18.04.1) gedit appears to have a new feature for line breaking.

With the preferences "line breaking" and "don't split words across two lines" both activated, gedit splits a line on certain symbols within a string, for example xyz/abc will be split after the /. Other characters that allow this are for example |!?.

However, the editor shows a hyphen symbol - when such a split is made. Screenshot:

enter image description here

To emphasize: I did not type the -, I typed xyz/abc and this was the output.

This feature is confusing for me, especially when I write programming code, or worse, when I read code written by others, thinking that there is a - in the code. Another case is urls in text files, which have a lot of / characters, where it looks as if there is a - in the url. There is no way to find this out by just looking at the editor, if you type xyz/-abc then the output is exactly the same. The only way to find out is to resize the editor window (then the - disappears) or to disable line breaking.

Is there a way to switch off this feature?

gedit

1 Answers

  1. There are three bugs for this. As far as I can understand, it was initially caused by Pango, which was fixed, but gedit still needs to be fixed to correctly use Pango. (Someone please correct me if this is wrong.)

    I suggest that you go to each bug, log in if required, and press the thumbs-up in the first post in the thread.

    Inserting an hyphen at line breaks looks wrong in applications like gedit (1)

    Inserting an hyphen at line breaks looks wrong in applications like gedit (2)

    Hyphen/dash inserted for text wrapping should be disabled in gedit

    Unfortunately, we're at the mercy of the developers, who don't seem to have taken this seriously. Perhaps we need to raise this as a bug with Ubuntu?

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