Make Vim only do a soft word-wrap, not hard word-wrap

Question

I've been using Vim for a week now. And I've noticed something.

I have textwidth unset, and I have wrap set. Now, my question is. Currently whenever I line longer than 120 characters (window width), it takes the last character, and just like that, wraps it. So if it's in the middle of a word it looks like this:

This is a very long sen|
tence, this looks very |
strange, don't you thin|
k?                     |

BTW, the | represents the text limit, very short in this case, to prove my point. So that says what my problem is, I would like a simply solution to this, as long as I don't lose any screen real estate.

Of course, the ideal solution would output the following, without modifying the text, only the output, the text remains in one line, but it appears to be spread over several:

This is a very long    |
sentence, this looks   |
very strange, don't you|
think?                 |

Thanks for any help you can provide. :)

Extra info:

OS: Mac OSX Mountain Lion
Using MacVim

I've tried the following:

set textwidth=120

set wrap
set linebreak

set fo=1

Some of the answers to http://stackoverflow.com/q/467739/684934 look promising. (None are accepted, though.) — , Nov 08 '12 at 17:36
@bdares Thanks, I didn't see that one. Still, it doesn't solve my problem, none of the options. — greduan, Nov 08 '12 at 17:40

score 24 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 08 '12 at 17:41

24

set linebreak

is enough. It doesn't work when list is on, though.

answered Nov 08 '12 at 17:41

romainl

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It is on. I do use `list`. :/ – greduan Nov 08 '12 at 17:42
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Well it's either one or the other. Sorry. – romainl Nov 08 '12 at 17:42
Is there no way around this? Maybe with a custom function that replaces this functionality? – greduan Nov 08 '12 at 17:53
No way that I know of: it's a low level feature. Typically the kind of thing you write a patch for. – romainl Nov 08 '12 at 19:15
I see, thanks for your answers. It's just that when I write text I like it without new lines. (Especially since I change it all the time). Nevertheless, thanks. :) – greduan Nov 08 '12 at 21:44
Has this changed? In my .vimrc I have both "set list" and "set lbr" and both are working. Vim 8.0 on Arch Linux. – Victoria Stuart Jan 07 '17 at 19:51
A lot of things can change in five years. – romainl Jan 07 '17 at 22:09
I think this has changed a little bit, now we can use list and linebreak at the same time. See the vim wiki link in the next answer for more details. – ospider Sep 08 '20 at 02:28

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 28 '13 at 00:04

0

My solution to this problem was this Vim wiki page. Thanks to @romainl for convincing me to not use list.

edited Feb 28 '13 at 00:04

Keith Pinson

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answered Nov 09 '12 at 02:07

greduan

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Make Vim only do a soft word-wrap, not hard word-wrap

2 Answers2