Avoid breaking words before or after asterisk ('*')

Question

If you have set wrap, sometimes you can see something like this:

5.  A soft-wrapped line with an *
    italic* word.

I would prefer Vim to not soft-wrap before or after asterisks, and so the same line should be wrapped as follows:

5. A soft-wrapped line with an
   *italic* word

What I need to do to fix this?

(linebreak is already turned on, of course.)

Answer 1

If you use the use 'soft wrap' and 'line break`

i.e.

set wrap
set linebreak
set textwidth=0  " To avoid confusion with hard wrap

Then Vim splits the lines only at the breakat characters.

If you would like Vim not to break at * make sure * is not part of breakat

set breakat-=*

If you use 'soft wrap' but not 'line break`

set wrap
set nolinebreak
set textwidth=0  " To avoid confusion with hard wrap

Then Vim splits the lines at the exact screen border.

:help linebreak

'linebreak' 'lbr'   boolean (default off)
            local to window
            {not available when compiled without the |+linebreak|
            feature}
    If on, Vim will wrap long lines at a character in 'breakat' rather
    than at the last character that fits on the screen.  Unlike
    'wrapmargin' and 'textwidth', this does not insert <EOL>s in the file,
    it only affects the way the file is displayed, not its contents.
    If 'breakindent' is set, line is visually indented. Then, the value
    of 'showbreak' is used to put in front of wrapped lines. This option
    is not used when the 'wrap' option is off.
    Note that <Tab> characters after an <EOL> are mostly not displayed
    with the right amount of white space.

Remark: For 'hard wrap' i.e.

set textwidth=80

Vim introduces a new line at the WORD boundaries (i.e. <space>, <tab>)