How to soft wrap text at column number lower than window width?

Question

I developed prompter.vim, a vim plugin that autocomplete buffer text using LLMs completions. The completion is a multi-line text insertion appended at the end to the buffer.

I would like to have completion text optionally justified in a fixed width of columns (say 80). This would be like :set textwidth=80, except with a soft wrap.

Well, a workaround could be to reformat the inserted text entering gqG, but this solution inserts newlines and modifies the text.

Instead I would like a soft-wrap "non-invasive" solution that only modifies the visual appearance.

Answer 1

I have found that vim post-9.0 patches and nvim 0.10.0 have an inline virtual-text feature to realize this. I implemented a plugin. Hope to help you.

Answer 2

There is no simple way to wrap at a specific column. You can soft-wrap at the edge of a window (:set wrap), or hard-wrap (e.g., with gq as mentioned), or write some code to do something "funky" (like using a second window purely to control wrapping…).