Soft wrapping breaks :center command

[shuber2]

This plugin causes textwidth to be set to 9999999, which breaks the :center command, different to when textwidth is set 0.

When tw=0 then :center centers the text if tw would have been 80, according to documentation. But with tw being "huge", it does as said and this causes delays and odd graphical effects. (At least for neovim v.0.11.1 on Gentoo (as of today) and on Debian with neovim vom snap (v.0.11.0).

[andrewferrier]

Hi - thanks for this. I'll be honest, despite having used Vim/NeoVim for many years, I didn't even know there was a :center command! Tested this and of course you are correct - this breaks that.

However, there are two reasons I think I wouldn't immediately jump into changing these to textwidth=0:

1. If you are doing soft wrapping, I would argue you are doing it because you want text to 'flow' automatically - so centering it is kind of meaningless anyway. The textwidth is only set to 9999999 in soft mode, so that should be fine on that basis.

2. Setting textwidth=0 breaks reformatting commands, in particular gqip, which no longer reformats soft paragraphs correctly, and instead breaks them at the 80-character boundary - I've still never figured out where that 80-character value actually comes from, I assume it's hardcoded into NeoVim. This is why I originally picked the 'very long' line length of 9999999 for soft wrapping.

Happy to discuss this though if you think there's an alternative approach I could take.

[shuber2]

Thank you for your quick response. I think I have a few comments on this:

I would not agree that gq is broken when tw=0; otherwise an issue should be opened for neovim. The help on gq defines the behavior:

In the third case the 'textwidth' option controls the length
of each formatted line (see below). If the 'textwidth' option
is 0, the formatted line length is the screen width (with a
maximum width of 79).

The 80-char boundary has historic reasons and probably the best default to come up with.

Also the help on textwidth is informative for this plugin, I think:

When 'textwidth' is zero, 'wrapmargin' may be used.  See also
'formatoptions' and |ins-textwidth|.

Maybe also you find columns a valuable option:

Number of columns of the screen.  Normally this is set by the terminal
initialization and does not have to be set by hand.

Finally, this SO answer on "Auto wrap lines in vim without inserting newlines" could be interesting to you.

[andrewferrier]

Hi - thanks for the comments. I guess I was being a bit dramatic when I said that textwidth=0 breaks gq - what I should say is that the behavior is not helpful for wrapping.nvim. The objective of the 'soft' wrapping mode in wrapping.nvim is that paragraphs should not contain hard line breaks, except at the end, and so lines should reflow naturally when resizing the NeoVim window. If you set textwidth=0, that doesn't happen, because when using gq, lines are hard-wrapped either at 79 characters, or at wrapmargin if it's set - but in both cases, hard line breaks are inserted, which defeats the purpose.

I don't think columns really helps in this case, because it should reflect the number of actual columns in the terminal - changing it breaks the statusline, for one.

So I'm not sure there's a clean answer here. The use of textwidth=999999 is a bit of a hack, I agree, but it's a workaround for a limitation of NeoVim. I'm not sure the :center command is popular enough to justify changing the textwidth for soft mode.

Really, I think all of this reflects some NeoVim limitations - right now I don't have a specific plan to deal with that, but ultimately it probably should be some issues on NeoVim itself.

[andrewferrier]

By the way, I think the SO answer is wrong - at least the first (soft wrap at the edge of the window) option - I just tested it, and it works when inserting text, but not when reformatting/reflowing it with gq/gw.

[shuber2]

By the way, I think the SO answer is wrong - at least the first (soft wrap at the edge of the window) option - I just tested it, and it works when inserting text, but not when reformatting/reflowing it with gq/gw.

I think the SO answer is correct in the sense that it says:

Here are 3 separate configurations you can use to obtain different line wrapping
behaviors while typing in insert mode

But you are also (half) correct about gq (and gw): If tw is zero then it reflows at the screen edge, but at most at 79 chars at maximum.

[shuber2]

Really, I think all of this reflects some NeoVim limitations - right now I don't have a specific plan to deal with that, but ultimately it probably should be some issues on NeoVim itself.

Maybe you can phrase this as an Issue in the Neovim project. Something at this direction is this discussion on setting custom max width. And this discussion on wrapmargin for soft-wrapping.

[andrewferrier]

Really, I think all of this reflects some NeoVim limitations - right now I don't have a specific plan to deal with that, but ultimately it probably should be some issues on NeoVim itself.

Maybe you can phrase this as an Issue in the Neovim project. Something at this direction is this discussion on setting custom max width. And this discussion on wrapmargin for soft-wrapping.

I think you're probably right, although I won't have the time in the near future to put together a well-structured issue for NeoVim. I think wrapmargin is maybe a bit of a red herring here, it's more the reflow behaviour of the formatting commands which needs addressing - but if NeoVim fixed this properly, it would remove the need for at least some of wrapping.nvim entirely.

I'll keep this issue open until I or someone has time to work on it. As far as I know the only thing that breaks right now is :center but I would be interested to know if anyone finds anything else.

[andrewferrier]

neovim/neovim#4386 and neovim/neovim#38167 could be interesting here.