I'm getting back in touch with my inner (g)vim due to an unscheduled MacBook mother(board) of a meltdown (my emergency backup Linux box won't run TextMate). All told I'm happy with vim's efficiency and power, but I'm mortified at how hard it is to get the kind of word wrap that even stupid HTML textareas achieve with no apparent effort.

Consider the text

Etiam ornare mollis tortor. Suspendisse sed neque. Nullam in elit. Cum sociis nullam.

By default, with an 80-character width vim displays this as

Etiam ornare mollis tortor. Suspendisse sed neque. Nullam in elit. Cum sociis nu
llam.

This wrapping doesn't care about whitespace, so sometimes it just slices words into pieces (nullam in this case). Of course, you can turn on word wrap, and get this:

Etiam ornare mollis tortor. Suspendisse sed neque. Nullam in elit. Cum sociis
nullam.

The problem is that vim inserts a newline at the linebreak, which I most emphatically do not want. In other words, I want the text to display exactly as vim displays it with word wrap turned on, but without inserting a newline. (This way it can be pasted into HTML textareas and email programs, among other places.)

Web searches have yielded nothing of use, despite diligent effort; I hope StackOverflow can succeed where my Google-fu has failed.