Scrolling wrapped lines

In the presence of wrapped lines, the default vim scrolling commands <C-f>, <C-b>, <C-d>, and <C-u> can cause the cursor position relative to the window to jump around erratically. This is extremely disorienting when navigating documents.

The fundamental problem is that vim tries to jump by exact numbers of lines -- but because the first line in the viewer is constrained to always be the start of a line, not a line continuation fragment, this often causes the window relative cursor line to change.

This plugin corrects this annoying behavior (see the below gif). Even with a tiny window, the cursor does not move up and down during scrolling. It only moves when the cursor line is adjusted j and k. Although the cursor sometimes jumps from left to right, owing to vim trying to preserve the column position with scrolling, this is a vast improvement on the default vim scrolling behavior.

Documentation

This plugin overrides the default scrolling commands and <C-f>, <C-b>, <C-d>, and <C-u>, and introduces new quarter page scrolling commands <C-j> and <C-k>. For each of these mappings, the plugin scrolls by as close as possible to one, one half, or one quarter of the window height without messing up the relative cursor line position.

:WrapToggle toggles line wrapping for the current buffer. Call this without arguments to toggle the wrapping mode on and off, or with 1 or 0 to set the wrapping mode to the on or off states. This also applies a series of buffer local normal mode mappings so that motion keys follow the wrapped lines instead of the actual lines. That is, the j, k, ^, $, 0, A, and I commands are swapped with the gj, gk, g^, g$, g0, gA, and gI commands.

g:scrollwrapped_wrap_filetypes specifies the filetypes for which :WrapToggle is called automatically when the file is opened. By default, this is ['bib', 'liquid', 'markdown', 'rst', 'tex'].

Installation

Install with your favorite plugin manager. I highly recommend the vim-plug manager. To install with vim-plug, add

Plug 'lukelbd/vim-scrollwrapped'

to your ~/.vimrc.