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I'm writing a LaTeX document in vim, and I have it hard wrapping at 80 characters to make reading easier. However, this causes problems with tracking changes with in version control. For example, inserting "Lorem ipsum" at the beginning of this text:
1 Dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus bibendum lobortis lectus 2 quis porta. Aenean vestibulum magna vel purus laoreet at molestie massa 3 suscipit. Vestibulum vestibulum, mauris nec convallis ultrices, tellus sapien 4 ullamcorper elit, dignissim consectetur justo tellus et nunc.
results in:
1 Lorum ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus bibendum 2 lobortis lectus quis porta. Aenean vestibulum magna vel purus laoreet at 3 molestie massa suscipit. Vestibulum vestibulum, mauris nec convallis ultrices, 4 tellus sapien ullamcorper elit, dignissim consectetur justo tellus et nunc.
When I review this change in git, it tells me that all the lines of the paragraph have changed because of the wrapping, even though only one semantic change has occurred. One way around this problem is to have every sentence on its own line. This looks the same in the rendered document, but the source now is harder to read, because each line has quite a different line length:
1 Lorum ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. 2 Phasellus bibendum lobortis lectus quis porta. 3 Aenean vestibulum magna vel purus laoreet at molestie massa suscipit. 4 Vestibulum vestibulum, mauris nec convallis ultrices, tellus sapien ullamcorper elit, dignissim consectetur justo tellus et nunc.
(If I soft wrap at 80, things still look bad, just in a different way.)
Is it possible to have my text on disk with one newline per sentence, but display and edit it in vim as if the text of each paragraph was one long line, soft wrapped at 80 characters? I assume it requires some vim-foo rather than tweaking git or LaTeX.
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If you want to wrap lines in a specific area, move the cursor to the text you want to format and type gq followed by the range. For example, gqq wraps the current line and gqip wraps the current paragraph.
Option 1 would be achieved by setting textwidth (for example :set textwidth=30 (from Swaarop's answer)). Then you can reformat your text by highlighting it (in visual mode) and typing gq . ( textwidth can be abbreviated as tw , thus :set tw=30 .) Option 2 can be toggled by running :set wrap / :set nowrap .
Command to toggle word wrap in Vim While :set wrap will turn on word wrap in Vim and :set nowrap will turn off word wrapping, you can also use both commands with the ! (bang) symbol to toggle word wrap.
A soft return or soft wrap is the break resulting from line wrap or word wrap (whether automatic or manual), whereas a hard return or hard wrap is an intentional break, creating a new paragraph. With a hard return, paragraph-break formatting can (and should) be applied (either indenting or vertical whitespace).
No need to introduce weird editing policies: the git feature you are looking for is using git diff --color-words to review changes.
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