In Vim, how to move text to be edited to the middle of the window?

Question

Is it possible to have the text in a (g)Vim window in the middle? This is the default: And this is what I would like to achieve (mockup created with gimp):

Answer 1

You could have empty windows on the left and right of the one you're editing:

:leftabove vnew
:wincmd l
:vnew
:wincmd h

To hide the dividers and tildes use the :highlight command and the VertSplit/NonText highlight groups. Note that hiding NonText also hides list characters, see :help 'list'.

So to hide dividers and the tildes in gvim you could do the following:

:highlight VertSplit guifg=bg guibg=bg
:highlight NonText   guifg=bg

Answer 2

There are plugins that create empty padding windows and turn off all the decorations; usually, they provide a command to toggle this view on/off:

• VimRoom
• DistractFree - An WriteRoom/DarkRoom/OmniWrite like plugin

Answer 3

:set foldcolumn=3          # replace with left border width you want
:set foldmethod=manual

// from here