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Navigating long lines with Vim's built-in capabilities Vim can attempt to show long lines with :set wrap (on by default). With :set linebreak , Vim will wrap the lines at characters in 'breakat' ; this generally makes the text easier to read (in older versions of Vim, one will also have to :set nolist ).
zL Move the view on the text half a screenwidth to the right, thus scroll the text half a screenwidth to the left. This only works when 'wrap' is off. zH Move the view on the text half a screenwidth to the left, thus scroll the text half a screenwidth to the right.
You can make Vim scroll the text using the shifted up/down arrows by mapping Shift-Up to Ctrl-Y and Shift-Down to Ctrl-E. Shift-Down will then scroll down (like moving a scroll-bar down, or like moving a cursor at the bottom of a window down), and Shift-Up will then scroll up (like moving a scroll-bar up, etc).
I use Vim to edit English text files with >10.000 words and long paragraphs. The files are formatted as plain text and each paragraph is a long line. I use the wrap option, and I bind j and k to gj and gk respectively so I can move by display lines.
If my cursor is on the top of the screen (but not the beginning of the document) and I move the cursor up (using gk), the screen scrolls up to display the whole long line (a 300-word paragraph). The problem is that because of the length of the line this makes the screen scroll by half of the screen. This is disorienting because I don't know beforehand how much the screen will move. Scrolling with ^Y has the same problem.
Is there a way to make Vim scroll by just one display line when using gk and its ilk? This is more natural for editing non-source-code and the default behavior in most text editors as well as in word processors, but not in Vim. I think this would mean that Vim would have to stop insisting on showing the entire line I'm editing.
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