How do you insert a newline after every 80 characters in vim?

Question

I have a long line of characters in vim. I'd like to insert a newline after 80 characters. How do I do that?

Answer 1

:%s/.\{80}/&\r/g

• %: process the entire file
• s: substitute
• .: matches any character
• {80}: matches every 80 occurrences of previous character (in this case, any character)
• &: the match result
• \r: newline character
• g: perform the replacement globally