How do I control the exact indentation amount for continuation lines when text wrapping is enabled?

Explanation

When breakindent is enabled, wrapped continuation lines are indented to match the start of their logical line. The breakindentopt option lets you fine-tune this behaviour with several sub-options, making long lines in prose, code comments, and markdown far easier to read.

How it works

First, enable the base option:

:set wrap breakindent

Then use breakindentopt to adjust the indent:

• shift:N — add an extra N columns of indent beyond the normal hanging indent. Useful for visually distinguishing continuation lines from the start of new lines.
• min:N — ensure at least N columns remain for the wrapped text, preventing over-indentation on deeply nested code.
• sbr — place the showbreak string (if set) inside the indentation rather than before it.

Multiple values can be combined with commas:

:set breakindentopt=shift:2,min:20

Example

Given a long comment with shift:4:

    /* This is a very long comment that wraps across multiple screen lines when the window is narrow */

With breakindentopt=shift:4, continuation lines appear as:

    /* This is a very long comment that wraps across
        multiple screen lines when the window is narrow */

Without breakindentopt, only the base breakindent would indent to column 4, matching the /* start.

Tips

• Pair with :set showbreak=↪\ to add a visual marker at the start of each continuation line
• min:N prevents extremely indented lines (e.g. 8-space indented code) from leaving no room for text
• These settings only affect visual display — the actual file content and newlines are unchanged
• Add to your vimrc / init.lua as vim.opt.breakindentopt = 'shift:2'