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

Use :set nowrap .. works like a charm!

Answer 2

set formatoptions-=t Keeps the visual textwidth but doesn't add new line in insert mode.

Answer 3

Use

:set wrap

To wrap lines visually, i.e. the line is still one line of text, but Vim displays it on multiple lines.

Use

:set nowrap

To display long lines as just one line (i.e. you have to scroll horizontally to see the entire line).

Answer 4

It is correct that set nowrap will allow you to paste in a long line without vi/vim adding newlines, but then the line is not visually wrapped for easy reading. It is instead just one long line that you have to scroll through.

To have the line visually wrap but not have newline characters inserted into it, have set wrap (which is probably default so not needed to set) and set textwidth=0.

On some systems the setting of textwidth=0 is default. If you don't find that to be the case, add set textwidth=0 to your .exrc file so that it becomes your user's default for all vi/vim sessions.

Answer 5

I like that the long lines are displayed over more than one terminal line

This sort of visual/virtual line wrapping is enabled with the wrap window option:

set wrap

I don’t like that vim inserts newlines into my actual text.

To turn off physical line wrapping, clear both the textwidth and wrapmargin buffer options:

set textwidth=0 wrapmargin=0

Answer 6

If, like me, you're running gVim on Windows then your .vimrc file may be sourcing another 'example' Vimscript file that automatically sets textwidth (in my case to 78) for text files.

My answer to a similar question as this one – How to stop gVim wrapping text at column 80 – on the Vi and Vim Stack Exchange site:

In my case, Vitor's comment suggested I run the following:

:verbose set tw?

Doing so gave me the following output:

textwidth=78
      Last set from C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vim74\vimrc_example.vim

In vimrc_example.vim, I found the relevant lines:

" Only do this part when compiled with support for autocommands.
if has("autocmd")

  ...

  " For all text files set 'textwidth' to 78 characters.
  autocmd FileType text setlocal textwidth=78

  ...

And I found that my .vimrc is sourcing that file:

source $VIMRUNTIME/vimrc_example.vim

In my case, I don't want textwidth to be set for any files, so I just commented out the relevant line in vimrc_example.vim.