[Feature request] An option to join lines for whole file, respecting paragraph breaks, like nano's Justify

[nevillepark]

The venerable terminal-based text editor nano has a command called "justify" (Ctrl+J) that joins all lines in a paragraph, or in marked (selected) text, wrapping the text to fill a certain length of characters. If you set the fill length to a very high number (like 100000) each paragraph becomes one long line, without wrapping, like xed's "join lines" command (also Ctrl+J).

However, nano also has a shortcut, Alt+J, to justify the entire file at once, keeping paragraph breaks (either a blank line between lines of text, or optionally an indent at the beginning of a line). This is very handy if, for example, you are reformatting text wrapped to a short line length but still want to keep the paragraph breaks. (Often the case with text copied and pasted from a PDF.) It would be nice if xed had something similar.

Currently, when you select text and press Ctrl+J, xed will get rid of blank lines/paragraph breaks:

Whereas in nano this is what Alt+J does:

This is basically the one thing that keeps nano in my workflow. It's just a "nice to have", but I wish xed had something similar.

[ItsZariep]

hi, if you’re interested in testing it, you can try my re-modified version of the Join-Lines plugin that adds nano-like justification.

To stay consistent with existing Xed keybindings, Ctrl + Alt + J triggers Justify All.
If you justify while text is selected, the justification will apply only to the selection.
If you want to join all lines unconditionally into a single line, you can use Ctrl + J.

[nevillepark]

Thank you, I will give it a try!