How to stop line breaking in vim

Question

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).

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

By default this will wrap at the first character that won't fit in the window. This means it will wrap in the middle of a word if that's where the window boundary lies. To change it to wrap on word boundaries, you can also:

:set linebreak

This will cause wrap to only wrap at the characters in the breakat setting, which defaults to space, tab, and small set of punctuation characters.

:set breatat
  breakat= ^I!@*-+;:,./?

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

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 (:).

Use :set nowrap .. works like a charm!