Wrapping Long Lines
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## Wrapping Long Lines

The word wrap feature splits lines at word boundaries in order to fit text within a specified wrap margin. The wrap margin position is indicated in the text are as a faint blue vertical line. There are two “wrap modes”, “soft” and “hard”; they are described below. The current wrap mode is shown in the status bar; see the section called “The Status Bar”. The wrap mode can be changed in one of the following ways:

- On a global or mode-specific basis in the Editing pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box. See the section called “The Editing Pane”.

- In the current buffer for the duration of the editing session,

  - By clicking the status bar indicator.

  - In the Utilities>Buffer Options dialog box. See the section called “The Buffer Options Dialog Box”.

  - From the keyboard, if a keyboard shortcut has been assigned to the Toggle Word Wrap command in the Shortcuts pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box. By default, this command does not have a keyboard shortcut.

- In the current buffer for future editing sessions by placing the following in one of the first or last 10 lines of the buffer, where `mode` is either “none”, “soft” or “hard”, and `column` is the desired wrap margin:

      :wrap=mode:maxLineLen=column:

### Soft Wrap

In soft wrap mode, lines are automatically wrapped when displayed on screen. Newlines are not inserted at the wrap positions, and the wrapping is automatically updated when text is inserted or removed.

If end of line markers are enabled in the Text Area pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box, a colon (“:”) is painted at the end of wrapped lines. See the section called “The Text Area Pane”.

### Hard Wrap

In hard wrap mode, inserting text at the end of a line will automatically break the line if it extends beyond the wrap margin. Inserting or removing text in the middle of a line has no effect, however text can be re-wrapped using the Edit>Text>Format Paragraph command. See the section called “Working With Paragraphs”.

Hard wrap is implemented using character offsets, not screen positions, so it might not behave like you expect if a proportional-width font is being used. The text area font can be changed in the Text Area pane of the Utilities>Global Options dialog box.

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