Question

/* Suppose I have a multi-line comment with hard line-breaks
 * that are roughly uniform on the right side of the text,
 * and I want to add text to a line in order to make the
 * comment a bit more descriptive.
 */

Now, most unfortunately, I need to add text to one of the top lines.

/* Suppose I have a multi-line comment with hard line-breaks (here is some added text for happy fun time)
 * that are roughly uniform on the right side of the text,
 * and I want to add text to a line in order to make the
 * comment a bit more descriptive.
 */

It takes O(n) time (n being the number of lines) to fix each line so that they roughly line up again. The computer should do this, not me.

Are there tools to deal with this in our IDEs? What are they called?

Answer 1

emacs supports the command fill-paragraph which is typically mapped to meta-q.

Output from fill-paragraph on your second paragraph of text:

/* Suppose I have a multi-line comment with hard line-breaks (here is
 * some added text for happy fun time) that are roughly uniform on the
 * right side of the text, and I want to add text to a line in order
 * to make the comment a bit more descriptive.
 */