How to word wrap in emacs?

Question

I'm a new user to emacs. How do I configure emacs so that line wrapping does not break in the middle of a word?

Answer 1

Can you specify what kind of wrapping are you talking about ?

M-x toggle-truncate-lines disable allow you to disable visually line breaking.

M-x auto-fill-mode + M-q allow you to wordwrap for real a pre-existing paragraph.

Answer 2

Add this to your init file:

(setq-default word-wrap t)

Alternatively, press C-h vword-wrap in Emacs and follow the "customize" link near the end.

Answer 3

If you want to emulate the behavior of an editor like Notepad, you might want to turn on visual line mode. While setting word-wrap will cause line wrapping at word boundaries, any action you take on a line (e.g., moving up/down or killing) will still respect the newline character. Visual line mode will treat each display line as though it had a newline at the end.

(visual-line-mode t)

Answer 4

id got to it first. You can read more about similar features at

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LineWrap

As a new user you might benefit from reading the page as there are some subtleties and history to deal with about word-wrap and long lines.

Answer 5

I discovered longlines-mode only recently (I think I was spelunking through the emacs Info docs). It wraps as you would expect in other UI editors' word-wrap feature. It's especially useful when I'm reading or writing free text with no newlines (a la Word) without the ugly mid-word wrapping that happens when you use M-x toggle-word-wrap.

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Longlines.html

my config:

(setq longlines-wrap-follows-window-size t)
(global-set-key [(control meta l)] 'longlines-mode)