How to stop line breaking in vim

Question

I like that the long lines are displayed over more than one terminal line   I don   t like that vim inserts newlines into my actual text  Which part of  vimrc I should change

User · Answer

I personnally went for   set wrap  set linebreak set breakindent set showbreak     Some explanation   wrap option visually wraps line instead of having to scroll horizontally linebreak is for wrapping long lines at a specific character instead of just anywhere when the line happens to be too long  like in the middle of a word  By default  it breaks on whitespace  word separator   but you can configure it with breakat  It also does NOT insert EOL in the file as the OP wanted  breakat is the character where it will visually break the line  No need to modify it if you want to break at whitespace between two words  breakindent enables to visually indent the line when it breaks  showbreak enables to set the character which indicates this break   See  h  lt keyword gt  within vim for more info  Note that you don t need to modify textwidth nor wrapmargin if you go this route

User · Answer

Use    set wrap   To wrap lines visually  i e  the line is still one line of text  but Vim displays it on multiple lines   Use   set nowrap   To display long lines as just one line  i e  you have to scroll horizontally to see the entire line

User · Answer

I like that the long lines are displayed over more than one terminal line   This sort of visual virtual line wrapping is enabled with the wrap window option   set wrap      I don   t like that vim inserts newlines into my actual text     To turn off physical line wrapping  clear both the textwidth and wrapmargin buffer options   set textwidth 0 wrapmargin 0

User · Answer

Use  set nowrap    works like a charm

User · Answer

set formatoptions- t Keeps the visual textwidth but doesn t add new line in insert mode

User · Answer

You may find set lbr useful  with set wrap on this will wrap but only cutting the line on whitespace and not in the middle of a word   e g   without lbr the li ne can be split on a word   and  with lbr on the line will be split on  whitespace only

User · Answer

It is correct that set nowrap will allow you to paste in a long line without vi vim adding newlines  but then the line is not visually wrapped for easy reading  It is instead just one long line that you have to scroll through   To have the line visually wrap but not have newline characters inserted into it  have set wrap  which is probably default so not needed to set  and set textwidth 0   On some systems the setting of textwidth 0 is default  If you don t find that to be the case  add set textwidth 0 to your  exrc file so that it becomes your user s default for all vi vim sessions

User · Answer

Its strange that such a simple setting would require this amount of  hocus-pocus  to work   To answer your question now  for me it seemed to work with the combination of the following    set wrap linebreak nolist    this seems to prevent existing lines from breaking  just wrap    AND  set formatoptions l    this prevents new edited lines from breaking  while    does not do it for me as other settings plugins seem to find space and add their own options which override mine

User · Answer

set tw 0  VIM won t auto-insert line breaks  but will keep line wrapping

User · Answer

If  like me  you re running gVim on Windows then your  vimrc file may be sourcing another  example  Vimscript file that automatically sets textwidth  in my case to 78  for text files   My answer to a similar question as this one     How to stop gVim wrapping text at column 80     on the Vi and Vim Stack Exchange site      In my case  Vitor s comment suggested I run the following    verbose set tw        Doing so gave me the following output   textwidth 78       Last set from C  Program Files  x86  Vim vim74 vimrc example vim       In vimrc example vim  I found the relevant lines     Only do this part when compiled with support for autocommands  if has  autocmd               For all text files set  textwidth  to 78 characters    autocmd FileType text setlocal textwidth 78              And I found that my  vimrc is sourcing that file   source  VIMRUNTIME vimrc example vim       In my case  I don t want textwidth to be set for any files  so I just commented out the relevant line in vimrc example vim

User · Answer

I m not sure I understand completely  but you might be looking for the  formatoptions  configuration setting  Try something like  set formatoptions- t  The t option will insert line breaks to make text wrap at the width set by textwidth  You can also put this command in your  vimrc  just remove the colon

[vim] How to stop line breaking in vim

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