Wrap to Column: an Intellij Plugin

This plugin wraps text to a maximum line width, as defined in the section "Setting the maximum line width." It is intended as a replacement for the gq command in Vim and fill-paragraph in Emacs.

Provided actions

Two commands are provided:

Wrap Line to Column: Wraps selected text or the current line if no text is selected. This is useful for IdeaVim users who wish to pair the command with motions like vip (select current paragraph).
Wrap Paragraph to Column: Wraps the paragraph in which the cursor appears. A paragraph is defined as text offset by blank lines -- including lines that only start with what looks like comment syntax (e.g., // ). Selected text is ignored (no selection is needed).

Setting the maximum line width

The maximum width of wrapped text is based on one of the following settings, in this order of priority:

The "Right margin override" setting found in the Wrap to Column settings panel
The right column setting configured for the language of the currently active editor tab
The editor's default right column setting

Installing

Install the plugin from an Intellij editor (like Intellij Ultimate, PyCharm, etc.) inside the Preferences -> Plugins window.

From the plugin repository

To install from the Plugin Repository:

Open Preferences -> Plugins and click the Browse repositories ... button
Search for "Wrap to column"
Choose Wrap to Column
Click Install
Restart the editor when prompted

To install from GitHub

To install the latest zip from GitHub:

Either clone the repository or download the latest release (https://github.com/abrookins/WrapToColumn/releases)
Open your Intellij editor of choice
Choose Preferences -> Plugins -> Install plugin from disk
Choose the WrapToColumn.zip (not the .jar file) file in the source checkout or your Downloads folder

Running

Keyboard shortcuts

The commands to run Wrap Line to Column are:

Mac: Command + Control + Shift + W
PC: Control + Alt + Shift + W

The commands to run Wrap Paragraph to Column are:

Mac: Command + Control + Shift + P
PC: Control + Alt + Shift + P

Feel free to change these in your keymap (Preferences -> Keymap) or IeaVim configuration file!

When using IdeaVim, you can invoke the above commands using the following actions:

Wrap Line to Column: com.andrewbrookins.idea.wrap.WrapAction
Wrap Paragraph to Column: com.andrewbrookins.idea.wrap.WrapParagraphAction

For example, you can add the following line to .ideavimrc to emulate Vim's gq command:

nmap gq :action com.andrewbrookins.idea.wrap.WrapAction<CR>

Menu item

Menu items should exist for both commands in the Edit drop-down menu:

Edit -> Wrap Line to Column
Edit -> Wrap Paragraph to Column

Settings

Right margin override

By default, this plugin uses your configured global or language-specific right margin setting as the column width to wrap at. However, you may provide a column width that will override both of these settings.

This setting exists in Settings (Preferences on OS X) -> Tools -> Wrap to Column.

The setting is named "Right margin override" and accepts an integer value.

Minimum raggedness

By default, text is wrapped using a greedy line-breaking algorithm. This can result in some lines having more whitespace than others.

You can turn on an alternative "minimum raggedness" algorithm in Settings -> Tools -> Wrap to Column. When this setting is on, the plugin will reconfigure text in a paragraph to produce the least amount of whitespace possible. Try it and see if you like it!

Tab width

Any lines that contain tabs (or are prefixed with tabs as an indent) will be reflowed as if the tabs were characters spaced at your configured tab width.

This means that the text will look right to you if your tab width is 4, but not to your co-maintainer whose tab width is 8. This seems to be the best trade-off.

A note about monospaced versus variable width fonts

This plugin reflows selected text by assuming that each character takes one column's worth of space (except tabs, which are expanded to your tab width).

This works fine with monospaced fonts. However, if you use a variable-width font, which seems to be common for some languages like Chinese (see issue #11), then the individual glyphs of the font take up more than one column.

The plugin will still wrap your text to e.g. 80 characters wide, but the position won't match Intellij's right margin guide.

Anyway, I recommend that you use a monospaced font if you can.

Roadmap

Bug fixes

License

This plugin is licensed under the GPLv2 and Apache License 2.0. See COPYING.txt and LICENSE.txt.

edgarsi/WrapToColumn