Vim auto line-break

Question

When I'm writing a long line of text in vim (such as a paragraph in latex), it wraps my text into multiple lines which is good. However, if I then try to navigate these lines with 'j' and 'k' (or the up/down arrows) it will skip the entire paragraph. I fixed this problem by highlighting the paragraph and pressing gq. This inserts line breaks at the end of each line.

My question is, is there a way to automate this, so I don't have to keep highlighting text and pressing gq?

Solution 1

You need to step back a little and use gj and gk which go down and up inside wrapped lines.

Since gjand gk work exactly the same as j and k in non-wrapped lines you can safely map j or <down> to gj and k or <up> to gk making it all seamless.

-- EDIT --

Yes it doesn't adress Eddy's immediate problem but it solves his original problem (vertical movement in wrapped lines) which led him to a poor workaround that, in turn, put him in this situation.

Solution 2

You can limit the width of a line with the textwidth option (see :help tw).

For example, if you want to limit the width to 80 columns, you can use:

:set tw=80

With this option, when you will type something longer than 80 columns, Vim will automatically insert a newline character.

Comments

[Dmitry Frank]

But there's an issue: when adding new words in an existing line, you will have to select paragraph and press gq to re-align it. You can automate this by typing :set fo+=a. Read :help fo and :help fo-table about this. But, unfortunately, this mode (after :set fo+=a) works not very good and has several issues too.

[Eddy]

Thanks, this is good because I use svn version control for my latex documents, so now diff won't show loads of lines that have changed due to linebreaks and word wrapping.

[cprn]

Also, it doesn't break lines without white space. Just thought it's worth mentioning.