Editing xml files with long lines is really slow in vim. What can I do to fix this?

Question

I edit a lot of xml files with vim. The problem is that, because of the long lines, navigation/editing in vim is extremely slow. Is there something I can do (besides turning off

Answer 1

You can this function to your .vimrc to reformat your xml file and hopefully reduce line length.

function! DoPrettyXML()
  " save the filetype so we can restore it later
  let l:origft = &ft
  set ft=
  " delete the xml header if it exists. This will
  " permit us to surround the document with fake tags
  " without creating invalid xml.
  1s///e
  " insert fake tags around the entire document.
  " This will permit us to pretty-format excerpts of
  " XML that may contain multiple top-level elements.
  0put =''
  $put =''
  silent %!xmllint --format -
  " xmllint will insert an  header. it's easy enough to delete
  " if you don't want it.
  " delete the fake tags
  2d
  $d
  " restore the 'normal' indentation, which is one extra level
  " too deep due to the extra tags we wrapped around the document.
  silent %<
  " back to home
  1
  " restore the filetype
  exe "set ft=" . l:origft
endfunction

command! PrettyXML call DoPrettyXML()