If you’re frustrated with Emacs’ default behavior of displaying \ characters when wrapping long lines, try this:
M-x longlines-mode M-x longlines-show-hard-newlines
This only changes the way your file is displayed — it does not insert or remove anything from the file’s contents. At the end of a line beyond 70 characters, if there is a reasonable word-break, then a | will be displayed (in red, if you have colors) and then the remainder of the line will wrap to the following line.
