Break line even if it fits the screen

Question

I think everyone knows that vim can't display multiline messages in quickfix (yes, I know that it can parse them and show them as one big line). I thought about ways to workaround this and thought what if vim can wrap lines at arbitrary characters, I know it can wrap lines that are longer than number current screen. Maybe it can be done with arbitrary lines? If it would be so I could insert some characters instead of newlines in multiline messages so that vim would break lines at this characters.

Answer 1

The linebreak option instructs vim to wrap at the characters specified in the breakat option (by default spaces and a handful of punctuation characters). You can choose some "harmless" control character. For example, ^Y or control+Y

set wrap linebreak
exe "set breakat=\<c-y>"

will turn

I think everyone knows that vim can't display^Ymultiline messages in quickfix

(visually) into

I think everyone knows that vim can't display^Y
multiline messages in quickfix

This introduces the problem that <c-y> is visible as ^Y. For this you could use vim's conceal feature.

syn match QFBreak /\%o31/ conceal cchar=↲
set cole=2

To completely hide the character, use set cole=3 instead.