Stop Vim wrapping lines in the middle of a word
VimVim Problem Overview
After doing :set wrap, Vim wraps lines longer than the window.
But is it possible to have Vim wrap to a new line on blank spaces only, not half-way through a word?
Vim Solutions
Solution 1 - Vim
:help wrap
> This option changes how text is displayed. It doesn't change the text > in the buffer, see 'textwidth' for that. > When on, lines longer than the width of the window will wrap and > displaying continues on the next line. When off lines will not wrap > and only part of long lines will be displayed. When the cursor is > moved to a part that is not shown, the screen will scroll > horizontally. > The line will be broken in the middle of a word if necessary. See > 'linebreak' to get the break at a word boundary.
:help linebreak
> If on Vim will wrap long lines at a character in 'breakat' rather > than at the last character that fits on the screen.
:help breakat
> 'breakat' 'brk' string (default " ^I!@*-+;:,./?")
So, :set linebreak and it should work out of box. Or you can restrict breakat to just break on spaces, instead of spaces+punctuation.
Solution 2 - Vim
Use
:set linebreak
Or 'lbr' for short. It will break lines on characters included in your 'breakat' option, which includes a space by default.
Solution 3 - Vim
With vim open, press esc and enter
:set lbr
Solution 4 - Vim
The following will do a line wrap without breaking any words and preserve the shorter lines.
:set formatoptions+=w
:set tw=80
gggqG
To try and format the current paragraph try the follwoing:
:nnoremap Q gqip
Solution 5 - Vim
The following commands work for me, and I am using Red Hat 7.x at work, and Cygwin 3.1.4 at home. The exclamation point acts like a not operator.
:set wrap
:set wrap!