How do I manage newlines in Latex?

Question

So, maybe I missed something completely when I started using Latex, but I have a difficult managing newlines in the Latex source. I have to put hard returns at the end of lines because even powerful editors like Emacs or Vim don't seem to manage that (at least out of the box).

For example, if I have the following paragraph in my Latex file:

So, maybe I missed something completely when I started using Latex,[\n]
but I have a difficult managing newlines in the Latex source. I have[\n]
to put hard returns at the end of lines because even powerful editors[\n]
like Emacs or Vim don't seem to manage that (at least out of the box).[\n]

But then I want to add a the parenthetical "but, not newlines in the Latex output" to the second line so then I get something like this:

So, maybe I missed something completely when I started using Latex, [\n]
but I have a difficult managing newlines in the Latex source (but, not newlines in the Latex output). I have [\n]
to put hard returns at the end of lines because even powerful editors [\n]
like Emacs or Vim don't seem to manage that (at least out of the box).[\n]

Assuming that before I insert the phrase, the lines we at the 80 character boundary, I get rather unmanageable soft line wraps. When this happens, the act of pushing the 'down' arrow brings me to the same column in the next line, completely ignoring the soft line breaks.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

I'm not certain I understand what you are asking, but it is possible that longlines-mode in emacs will gve you the behavior that you want.

Answer 2

If I read your question right, this has nothing to do with LaTeX other than you happen to be editing LaTeX source?

If you want to tell vim to wrap lines at, say, 78 characters:

:set tw=78

If you want to do this for all .tex files, add the following command to your .vimrc:

autocmd BufRead *.tex set tw=78

Answer 3

In emacs, with Autofill mode M-x auto-fill-mode, you can M-q and emacs formats the text as you want it.