My opinions on hard line-wrapping
An example of a soft-wrapped document.
An example of a hard-wrapped document.
Before you hard-wrap your tex-file consider the following...
...I might prefer longer lines than you
By hard-wrapping you impose your preferred line width upon me. By avoiding hard-wrapping you allow me to soft-wrap at whatever line-width I want.
...I might have a narrower editor/terminal than you
What if my text editor is a bit narrower than
yours? Your
hard-wrapped lines might end up like this in
my editor. This
is annoying since it is harder to read.
...it sometimes prevents navigation by search
If I read a pdf-version of your document and want to jump to the corresponding point in the latex document I want to be able to search for a sequence of words. This will be impossible if the sequence of words has a hard-wrap somewhere in it.
...it might be hard to go back!
As far as I know there is no way of easily going back to "soft-wrap" or "long lines".
Here is a link for all emacs users.