In VIM, how do I break one really long line into multiple lines?

Question

Say I have a super long line in the VIM editor (say around 300+ characters). How would I break that up into multiple lines so that the word boundaries roughly break at 80 chara

Answer 1

If you're on *nix you probably have fold available.

Select the region you want using v, then you can break on spaces at width 80 using:

!fold --spaces --width=80

This is esentially the same as using gq.

However, if you just want to break at character 80 and not be restricted to whitespaces you can use:

!fold --width=80

If you want it with one keystroke just set a mapping - I've used

vmap !fold --width=80