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vimindentation

How can I wrap text to some length in Vim?

Let's speak of relative measures. My Vim looks like:

aaaaaaaaaaaaa 
bbbbbbbbbbbbb 
ccccccccccccc 
etc

I would like it to be smaller:

aaaaa
aaaaa
bbbbb
bbbbb
ccccc
ccccc
etc

How can I get it? And how can I manage setting the length of such a block?

Solution

  • You can actually do two things:

    1. Let vim format (i.e.change) your text to have shorter lines, by inserting linebreaks
    2. Leave lines as they are, but display them wrapped

    Which do you want?

    Option 1 would be achieved by setting textwidth (for example :set textwidth=30 (from Swaarop's answer)). Then you can reformat your text by highlighting it (in visual mode) and typing gq. (textwidth can be abbreviated as tw, thus :set tw=30.)

    Option 2 can be toggled by running :set wrap / :set nowrap. This will wrap lines which are too long for the window.

    Both are independent.