First off, the commit message is plain text (by design) and can't be "wrapped" automatically, and any tool that tried would be insane.
The reason for 72 characters is that the CLI, like lots of other presentation mechanisms (including quoting in other commits or in code), wants to indent your message for readability. And the uniform standard width for terminals has been 80 characters for like four decades now.
Must it be? I dunno. I can imagine a uniform agreement among a broad team that everyone will assume a 100 character line and all tools should enforce that. Maybe a little more, but not that much because even on a modern screen you want to have two full terminals of text readable at a time.
But that's just a number. You'd still be told by your commit message style guide (or checkpatch.pl, or whatever) to wrap your lines manually at 92 characters. Is 25% more bytes on a line really worth yelling about?
>This text box I'm replying to you with is a plain text textbox. It word-wraps just fine.
No it doesn't. In fact I had to edit a comment I made above this one about four times until I got the formatting right. It annoyingly ignored me doing this:
You're missing my point because you don't understand the meaning I'm going for here. The comment box is not markdown, it's plaintext. This is not a rich text WYSIWYG editor.
My original point is that plenty of software does plaintext wrapping just fine and it's pretty ridiculous that consoles are stuck in this 80 character mindset.
First off, the commit message is plain text (by design) and can't be "wrapped" automatically, and any tool that tried would be insane.
The reason for 72 characters is that the CLI, like lots of other presentation mechanisms (including quoting in other commits or in code), wants to indent your message for readability. And the uniform standard width for terminals has been 80 characters for like four decades now.
Must it be? I dunno. I can imagine a uniform agreement among a broad team that everyone will assume a 100 character line and all tools should enforce that. Maybe a little more, but not that much because even on a modern screen you want to have two full terminals of text readable at a time.
But that's just a number. You'd still be told by your commit message style guide (or checkpatch.pl, or whatever) to wrap your lines manually at 92 characters. Is 25% more bytes on a line really worth yelling about?