How do I set an unlimited textwidth in Vim?

Question

In Vim, I don't want to have a text width at all. I would like lines to go on forever. I tried set textwidth=0 but fq will still wrap the lines up to a certain number. The only way I can do this now is to set textwidth to a very large (but not too large) number. Is there a way to say that I want an unlimited text width?

Answer 1

Setting textwidth to 0 is the right way to not have a limit on the text width. As for gq, it's documented that it uses the screen width if textwidth is set to 0.

If you want to just join lines and not wrap them at all, then you can just use J instead of gq, which will join the lines into one line, and may provide what you're looking for in terms of formatting.