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Here is one way to achieve your goal in the (old) Sage Notebook.

While editing a text cell, click on the "HTML" button of the formatting bar (one of the last icons in that bar). This will open a pop-up window called "HTML Editor", and containing the HTML source for your text.

For instance, it might read:

<p>With the default settings, cells in the notebook take the whole width of the window.
This is annoying for rich text cells with long paragraphs, as they get very hard to read.
Also if you are using LaTeX math mode, the equations will be centered on the window,
which looks bad if you only have rather short lines of text surrounding them.</p>
<p>I would like to know if there is a way to restrict the width of the rich text cells,
such that lines of text get broken earlier and readability is improved. The settings
contain an option for number of word wrap columns, but it seems to have no effect
whatsoever on my worksheets.</p>

Now just wrap everything in a table of your chosen width:

<table style="width: 500px;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>With the default settings, cells in the notebook take the whole width of the window.
This is annoying for rich text cells with long paragraphs, as they get very hard to read.
Also if you are using LaTeX math mode, the equations will be centered on the window,
which looks bad if you only have rather short lines of text surrounding them.</p>
<p>I would like to know if there is a way to restrict the width of the rich text cells,
such that lines of text get broken earlier and readability is improved. The settings
contain an option for number of word wrap columns, but it seems to have no effect
whatsoever on my worksheets.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

I understand doing this globally would be preferrable, but at least this works if you're ready to perform this action for each cell.

Here is one way to achieve your goal in the (old) Sage Notebook.

While editing a text cell, click on the "HTML" button of the formatting bar (one of the last icons in that bar). This will open a pop-up window called "HTML Editor", and containing the HTML source for your text.

For instance, it might read:

<p>With the default settings, cells in the notebook take the whole width of the window.
This is annoying for rich text cells with long paragraphs, as they get very hard to read.
Also if you are using LaTeX math mode, the equations will be centered on the window,
which looks bad if you only have rather short lines of text surrounding them.</p>
<p>I would like to know if there is a way to restrict the width of the rich text cells,
such that lines of text get broken earlier and readability is improved. The settings
contain an option for number of word wrap columns, but it seems to have no effect
whatsoever on my worksheets.</p>

Now just wrap everything in a table of your chosen width:

<table style="width: 500px;">
600px;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p>With the default settings, cells in the notebook take the whole width of the window.
This is annoying for rich text cells with long paragraphs, as they get very hard to read.
Also if you are using LaTeX math mode, the equations will be centered on the window,
which looks bad if you only have rather short lines of text surrounding them.</p>
<p>I would like to know if there is a way to restrict the width of the rich text cells,
such that lines of text get broken earlier and readability is improved. The settings
contain an option for number of word wrap columns, but it seems to have no effect
whatsoever on my worksheets.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

I understand doing this globally would be preferrable, but at least this works if you're ready to perform this action for each cell.