gVim: How to prevent horizonal scrollbar from resetting when scrolling vertically?

Question

I am quite new to Vim and am trying to configure gVim with some of the behaviour that I like from notepad++.

I disabled text wrapping with :set nowrap, then added the horizontal scrollbar with :set guioptions+=b.

However, if I scroll horizontally to the right, scrolling vertically then forces the horizontal scrollbar all the way back to the left. I would like the horizontal position to stay fixed while I scroll vertically. Is there some way to do this?

I get the same behaviour under both linux (CentOS 6) and Windows 7 (64-bit).

Answer 1

By default the cursor is always on a column that contains real text.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

If your cursor is in line 1 on the character '9' and you move down, the cursor "jumps" to the character '5' in the second line. If you move down again, it jumps to the '9' in the third line. Because of this change of the cursor column, the horizontal scrollbar changes.

If you want the cursor always on the column of the character '9' (even when there is no text), you have to do set virtualedit=all.

See :help virtualedit and read the entire section. It contains a warning that this setting might break plugins or Vim scripts.