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 <keyword> within vim for more info.

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

Answer 2

You may find set lbr useful; with set wrap on this will wrap but only cutting the line on whitespace and not in the middle of a word.

e.g.

without lbr the li
ne can be split on
a word

and

with lbr on the
line will be
split on 
whitespace only

Answer 3

Its strange that such a simple setting would require this amount of 'hocus-pocus' to work.

To answer your question now, for me it seemed to work with the combination of the following:

:set wrap linebreak nolist

(this seems to prevent existing lines from breaking, just wrap.)

AND

set formatoptions=l

(this prevents new/edited lines from breaking, while += does not do it for me as other settings/plugins seem to find space and add their own options which override mine.)

Answer 4

I'm not sure I understand completely, but you might be looking for the 'formatoptions' configuration setting. Try something like :set formatoptions-=t. The t option will insert line breaks to make text wrap at the width set by textwidth. You can also put this command in your .vimrc, just remove the colon (:).

Answer 5

:set tw=0

VIM won't auto-insert line breaks, but will keep line wrapping.