Re: Setting "tw=0" - can text be wrapped at a custom length still?

On 2011-07-09, Jason Timrod wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This may or may not be a naive approach in Vim, so if there's a better way, please say.
>
> Whenever I want to disable Vim wrapping lines at a certain width, I set this:
>
> :set tw=0
>
> And then my lines are never wrapped.
>
> This is fine -- it's what I want.  But one thing I've always
> wondered about is if there's a way for Vim to still keep "tw=0"
> but soft-wrap at a certain length?  What I dislike about setting
> "tw=0" is that the size of the line is dependent on the size of my
> terminal.  What I'd like to achieve is still keeping "tw=0" set,
> but for vim to visual layout the lines as though it had wrapped at
> a width of, say, "78" characters, or some other value.
>
> To give a reason why I even set "tw=0" in the first place, I often
> use vim to write long messages in HTML forms, especially
> textareas.  Often, these things don't like to have wrapped text at
> all, and I've found that if I set "tw=0" beforehand in Vim, I can
> then copy and paste the whole lot into a textarea, and when the
> text is submitted and displayed in something like a forum-post, it
> looks as though I had typed it directly into the textarea.
>
> If the above is possible in still setting "tw=0" and visually
> making the lines appear to wrap, I would still want the behaviour
> of copying and pasting text  to still retain the fact that even
> though the lines appear to be wrapped at a certain value, they're
> still as one line.
>
> I hope that makes sense, and I appreciate any suggestions people
> might have.  Note that I have read up on formatoptions and the
> like, and I thought some of those options might help; but I admit
> it was a guess on my part, and am unsure what side-effects setting
> them might have.  Was formatoptions the right thing to be reading
> about?  Any ":h" pointers are welcome as well.  :)

That makes perfect sense, but Vim doesn't do that, it only wraps at
the window width.

You can make the wrapping look better with this:

set linebreak

which will cause wrapping to occur at word boundaries rather than
right at the terminal edge.

Regards,
Gary

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