I had a bit more of a think about that Unsung post about responsive code blocks. Apparently there exists a package which can format Go code assuming a certain width. It can also adjust the tab width and reflow comments and method calls. I asked GPT-6 Astra Light to build a quick playground for me to test it:

Prompt to Astra

In webtools is a set of basic web-tools. I would like you to add a new tool for testing out golines, shown here: github.com/golangci/… There should be a package version of this called shorten, documented here: pkg.go.dev/github.co…

What I’m thinking is a new tool which takes as input a Go program. It will use shorten to format the Go input and render it as output. There should be a slider allowing the user to adjust the Config.MaxLen (min width = 40, max width = 180, step = 5). Other config should be as follows:

• TabLen = 4, unless MaxLen < 80, then 2
• ShortenComments = true
• ReformatTags = true
• ChainSplitDots = true

Try to produce a WASM target for this, much like some of the other tools in this project.

It was my first test of Astra actually, and I was quite happy with what it produced:

Anyway, adding something like this for Go code on this site might be viable. My current thinking is adding a module to Blogging Tools which would allow me to copy-paste a Go snippet, which would then be formatted four different ways, based on the assumed client width. I don’t know how that would appear on the site though. Probably one code block which would assume a baseline width, and some JavaScript or CSS which would replace it with something more size appropriate. I’ll also need to work with RSS and PageFind indexing. I’ll have to have a think about that.