>> if you really need to reformat if you could keep them as separate commits
> I am not sure how often I have to explain this? What editor are you using? AFAIK you are actually the odd one out with using Eclispe. So maybe your formatting is "wrong"?

Are you using XMLEditor 5.3.0. I remember, Gunnar and I had trouble due to a different version.
Asciidoc (and text based markup generally) do solve this problem as we as a team can decide not to do text wrap and do say one sentence per line.