Git commit hard and soft wrap not respected

[willma-andela]

Reproduction steps

There are two closely related issues here regarding hard and soft wrapping in the editor and the git panel that do not behave as documented

preferred_line_length not respected in the editor

When using the editor to edit a commit message, the text soft wraps at the correct number of characters, but once I save the commit and check my git log, I can see that it did not hard wrap at that character count. The docs state

You can configure how Zed hard wraps commit messages with the preferred-line-length setting of the "Git Commit" language. The default is 72

Reproduction

• Make a change to a file and run git commit -a in your terminal. Zed opens with the ability to edit the commit message
• Type more that 72 characters. Zed correctly soft wraps at 72 characters
• Save and exit and run git log in your terminal and you'll see that the commit message is not hard wrapped at 72 chars.

soft_wrap not respected in the git panel

The docs state

The Git Panel also allows configuring the soft_wrap setting to adjust how commit messages display while you are typing them in the Git Panel. The default setting is editor_width, however, none, preferred_line_length, and bounded are also options.

But when set to preferred_line_length, it still wraps to editor_width

Reproduction

• Make a change to a file and open the git panel
• Make the panel very wider (wider than 72 chars)
• Type a commit message in the panel that's longer than 72 chars. It does not soft wrap at 72 chars.

Current vs. Expected behavior

Editor soft wraps correctly at 72 chars:

Actual commit message is not hard wrapped:

Sidebar Panel editor does not soft wrap:

But commit is correctly hard wrapped

Floating panel correctly soft wraps

Zed version and system specs

Zed: v0.211.6 (Zed)
OS: macOS 15.7.2
Memory: 64 GiB
Architecture: aarch64

Attach Zed log file

Relevant Zed settings

settings.json

  "languages": {
    "Git Commit": {
      "soft_wrap": "preferred_line_length",
      "preferred_line_length": 72
    },
    ...
  }

Relevant Keymap

No response

(for AI issues) Model provider details

No response

If you are using WSL on Windows, what flavor of Linux are you using?

None

[mchisolm0]

Hey @will-marquardt-andela, thanks so much for reporting this so thoroughly! I think the problem is I misunderstood the actual current behavior when solving the issue #33441. I am currently waiting to hear back from the Zed team, but at minimum I know I will need to fix my errors in the docs.

I did want to clarify what you are saying works as expected and what does not. Is this table correct?

Edit Location	Soft wrap works as expected	Hard wrap works when committed
Zed editor	✅	❌
Zed git panel (side panel)	❌	✅
Zed commit message modal (Floating panel)	✅	✅

[mchisolm0]

I have not had a chance to find why hard wrapping the commit message from the main editor does not work (i.e. when a user commits using git commit with Zed as their default editor). I believe the workflow is the user saves and closes that buffer to trigger the commit, which will never call custom_or_suggested_commit_message or a similar function.

[mchisolm0]

For the git panel only using the editor_width for the soft wrap behavior, when I wrote the docs I incorrectly thought the current behavior was the git panel used the preferred_line_length setting from the user's settings.

In the crates/editor/src/element.rs file, there is a compute_auto_height_layout function that has the code

if !matches!(editor.soft_wrap_mode(cx), SoftWrap::None)
    && editor.set_wrap_width(Some(editor_width), cx)
{
let wrap_width_for = |column: u32| (column as f32 * em_width).ceil();
{
    snapshot = editor.snapshot(window, cx);
}

I believe this is getting used because the commit_editor is Editor::AutoHeight.

You can see in the video that changing only these lines of code results in the commit_editor using the "soft_wrap": "preferred_line_length" user setting.

Video of getting the commit editor to use `"preferred_line_length"`

CleanShot.2025-12-17.at.00.18.40.mp4

If the expected behavior is that commit_editor always uses soft_wrap of editor_width, then I just need to update the docs to reflect that. I could also see it being reasonable for the team to decide to start using the user's soft_wrap preference there. The use case I can think of is for a user that wants how the message looks in the commit_editor to match exactly what it will look like after it has been commited.

[mchisolm0]

Also, the default for preferred_line_length seems to actually be 80, not the 72 I put in the docs.

[willma-andela]

Thanks for looking into this. Yeah, the table is correct. I believe that Hard wrap works when committed in the Zed commit message modal (Floating panel) (replace ❔with ✅ in the table).

What I would like to see is for the line lengths in the soft-wrap and hard-wrap-on-commit to reflect preferred_line_length for the Zed editor and the floating panel.

As for the side panel, I'm not really sure where it should soft wrap. The panel width will often be less than preferred_line_length. Would it be awkward if the text is longer than the container and the user has to scroll horizontally to see the message?