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Asked: 2026-06-13T01:41:15+00:00

how do I make vim horizontally center the text of the open file? I

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how do I make vim horizontally center the text of the open file?

I don’t want to modify the file, just to change the way vim displays it.

To be more clear, when I open a file I currently have this situation:

|<------ textwidth=80 ------->|<-------------- padding -------------->|
|lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.. 
|dsdsda da dsa dsa

What I’d like to have is the following:

|<--- padding/2 --->|<------ textwidth=80 ------->|<--- padding/2 --->|
|                    lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.. 
|                    dsdsda da dsa dsa

Of course, for every value of textwidth and padding.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Vim isn’t meant to be a single, centered document editor (when programming, you want to fill every single pixel with relevant information), so there are only workarounds:

    a) You can achieve a larger left margin by expanding the fold column. Unfortunately, this is limited to 12 character cells:

    :let &foldcolumn = (&columns - &textwidth) / 2

    b) You can create an empty padding window to the left (and potentially also to the right, for symmetry).

    :execute 'topleft' ((&columns - &textwidth) / 2 - 1) . 'vsplit _paddding_' | wincmd p

    The annoying window split can be cleared with:

    :hi VertSplit guifg=bg guibg=NONE gui=NONE
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