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?

Answer 1

I personnally went for:

• set wrap,
• set linebreak
• set breakindent
• set showbreak=ͱ.

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 within vim for more info.

Note that you don't need to modify textwidth nor wrapmargin if you go this route.