VIM textwidth has no effect

unix vim text-editor neovim
Aeonaut picture Aeonaut · Feb 28, 2011 · Viewed 13.9k times · Source

This feels like a dumb question, but I can't find an answer on the Internet (or in VIM help). I'm using VIM 7.2 on Mac OS X. All I want to do is wrap my lines at 72 characters, but doing

:set textwidth=72

has no effect. The textwidth is being set correctly (I can see that when I just query ":set textwidth"), but neither existing lines nor new lines that I type after setting textwidth get wrapped. If I start a new line, still doesn't wrap. Open and close the file, no change. I've also tried :set wrapmargin=72 (with textwidth=0), with no effect.

What am I missing here?

Answer

Xavier T. picture Xavier T. · Feb 28, 2011

Try gggqGto apply the new text width to the whole buffer.

  • gg means : go to the beginning of buffer
  • gq means : reformat the text included in the motion
  • G means : go to the end of the buffer

(It will works if the format options are correctly set, as detailed in Zyx post)

On the other hand, you could also display your existing text with a width of 72 characters by adding a modeline at the beginning or end of your file. See :help modeline

Something like vim:tw=72 should work.

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