I'm posting the solution to my own question from experiments tonight.
To easily force VIM to paste text wrapped at 72 characters do the following:
1. Copy the old ~/.vimrc to ~/.vimrcp
2. Edit ~/.vimrcp and comment out the existing line
autocmd FileType text setlocal textwidth=78
and replace it with the line
set textwidth=72
This was messing up the paste for unknown reasons.
3. Create an alias in ~/.bashrc or in my case /etc/bashrc
for text pasting use.
alias vip='vim -u /home/lba/.vimrcp'
4a. When you wish to copy and paste text from a web site simply invoke:
vip name_of_file
and the text will always be wrapped at 72.
4b. Otherwise vim will work in the normal way with ~/.vimrc.
Thanks Russell Bateman for your reply although I found a different way.
Larry
--
Larry Alkoff N2LA - Austin TX
Using Thunderbird on Linux
