Auto Line Breaking in Vim

Almost a year ago I switched my blog engine over to Jekyll. Since then, all of my posts have been written in my favorite editor, Vim. One of the handy settings that I’ve ended up using quite a bit of while using the editor to write paragraphs instead of code is textwidth.

Description:

‘textwidth’ ‘tw’ number (default 0)
Maximum width of text that is being inserted. A longer line will be broken after white space to get this width. A zero value disables this. ‘textwidth’ is set to 0 when the ‘paste’ option is set. When ‘textwidth’ is zero, ‘wrapmargin’ may be used. See also ‘formatoptions’ and |ins-textwidth|. When ‘formatexpr’ is set it will be used to break the line. NOTE: This option is set to 0 when ‘compatible’ is set.

This is super handy when you want your line to automatically wrap to the next after a certain number of characters are written. In my case, I like setting it to 72, which wraps to the next line once I go over 72 characters.

:set tw=72

This operates on the current buffer and all new typing wraps at 72 characters.

But what about modifying existing content? Say for instance I need to edit a paragraph that is already written? The textwidth setting does not always work here and a format - gq command must be executed.

When wanting to perform this on the existing paragraph I normally just go into visual mode and select the paragraph and issue the format.

So to select the current paragraph and reformat: vap followed by gq

While a great editor, Vim needs a bit of tweaking to work in word processor mode. These settings and commands help it feel a bit more natural to write more like humans would.

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