How do I show a special symbol at the beginning of show lines (which are in the middle of logical lines) when wrap is on?

Question

The screenshot of vim-gitgutter clearly shows its author uses some kind of continuation line character when wrap is on. How do I get that? I thought I could find it listed in :help 'listchars', but it's not.

Answer 1

Use the 'showbreak' option. From :h 'showbreak':

'showbreak' 'sbr'      string (default "")
                       global or local to window |global-local|

       String to put at the start of lines that have been wrapped.

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It looks to me like they are using the Unicode character ↪ (Rightwards Arrow with Hook, U+21AA). To enter a Unicode character into Vim, use :h i_CTRL-V.

After typing Ctrl+v, you can hit u and type the hexadecimal representation of the desired Unicode character (as specified in :h i_CTRL-V_digit).

So, to type ↪, you would perform the following keypresses while in insert or command-line mode:

Ctrl+v u 21aa

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Then, you can set showbreak=↪ in your .vimrc.