VIM textwidth has no effect

Question

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

Answer 1

I was looking for an answer to the same question and had to scramble around a bit before I found the solution in the VIM docs. So, i thought i will update the thread and save others the time.

The problem in my case was that the default ftplugin was disabling textwidth.

Just updating your .vimrc with (:set tw=79 && :set formatoptions+=t) won't work since the fplugins are sourced after vimrc.

Here are the steps that i followed:

1) find out what your current formatoptions (inside vim)

:set formatoptions?
formatoptions=croql (note no 't')

2) create a filetype.vim file as suggested by vimdocs (http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/filetype.html#ftplugin-overrule)

Overrule the settings after loading the global plugin.
You must create a new filetype plugin in a directory from the end of
'runtimepath'.  For Unix, for example, you could use this file:
    vim ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/fortran.vim
In this file you can change just those settings that you want to change.

3) add the line :set formatoptions+=t && :set textwidth=79 in that file.

Voila! next time when you open the file it will set the textwidth to your desired characters.

As a debugging aid you can always check which file is overriding your vimrc setting by prepending your command with verbose. So for e.g. if i want to check who updated the formatoptions last, i would type

:verbose set formatoptions? 
formatoptions=croqlt
Last set from ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/fortan.vim