Answer by Ehtesh Choudhury for vim command to restructure/force text to 80 columns

If you're looking for a non-Vim way, there's always the UNIX commands fmt and par.

Notes:

• I can't comment on Unicode, it may or may not behave differently.
• @nelstrom has already mentioned using par in his webcast.

Here's how we would use both for your example.

$ echo -e 'long line is long!\nshort'> 3033423.txt$ cat 3033423.txtlong line is long!short$ fmt -w 13 3033423.txtlong line islong!  short$ par 13gr 3033423.txtlong line islong! short

To use from inside Vim:

:%! fmt -w 13:%! par 13gr

You can also set :formatprg to par or fmt and override gq. For more info, call :help formatprg inside Vim.