I posted the same question at StackOverflow, which also yielded some useful advice: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/467739/how-do-you-get-vim-to-display-wrap

I posted the same question at StackOverflow, which also yielded some useful advice: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/467739/how-do-you-get-vim-to-display-wrapped-lines-without-inserting-newlines http://stackoverflow.com/questions/467739/how-do-you-get-vim... Basically, my terminal app was at fault, not vim. Switching from xterm to gnome-terminal fixed the problem.