Question

How can I can specific word wrapping for specific tags. For example, in LaTex I want word wrapping for my paragraphs but not for my figure commands (they are always very long and run off the screen).

Or with Javascript, I want the right margin for code to be at, for example 50 columns, but for the comments to be at only 40 columns

Answer 1

This is not builtin

You could probably script something yourself using a devious combination of `formatexpr` and synID(). I suggest you look at the help of the latter first, because it contains inspirational samples:

for id in synstack(line("."), col("."))
    echo synIDattr(id, "name")
endfor

_{taken from :he synstack}

The formatexpr is usually set to something like

:set formatexpr=mylang#Format()

thus delegating to a filetype plugin. You could implement the function to use different margins for different syntax contexts.

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Bear in mind

• the default formatexpr (if absent, formatprg) are probably no good for a source file (in my experience it has the tendency to string together lines as if they were text paragraphs). But then again, you can implement it any which way you want

• that syntax highlighting may become out of sync. I’m not sure what happens when the cursor is at, say, 70% of a large document and you issue ggVGgq. It might not update the syntax highlighting all the way (meaning that your formatexpr function would get the ‘wrong’ synID() values. You get around this by saying something like

   :syntax sync fromstart
  

  this again might impact the highlighting performance depending on the size/complexity of the source and highlighting scripts