What is the use of a fill-column if most modern text editors can word-wrap?

Question

I have my emacs fill-column set to almost 10 trillion (999999999999). Is that bad, or is there another way to make emacs have a virtually infinite fill-column?

What is the use of a fill-column anyways? Why would one want that sort of line wrapping?

Answer 1

Yes, you can have a gigantic fill-column. Or yes, you can turn off auto-fill-mode (use (auto-fill-mode -1) or set auto-fill-function to nil).

"That sort of line wrapping" is useful if you want text that has lines of limited length. (Duh.)

See also visual-line-mode, which can give you a similar visual effect but without the insertion of hard newlines.