Emacs truncate lines in all buffers

Question

What can I put in my .emacs file so that all lines an any kind of buffer always truncate if too long. I do this mostly because I tend to open many frames and it gets hard to read on a small screen if my 80 char lines get wrapped 2 or 3 times over.

Answer 1

Try M-x toggle-truncate-lines on a per buffer basis, to see if it does what you want.

In .emacs you'd put this, to make it default for all buffers.

(setq-default truncate-lines t)

You may also like:

(setq-default global-visual-line-mode t)

Which you can try out with M-x visual-line-mode (it also toggles.)

^{EmacsWiki references: visual-line-mode truncate-lines}

Answer 2

In your .emacs or .emacs.el or .emacs.d/init.el (depends where you locate your main emacs config file), write :

(custom-set-variables
  '(truncate-lines t))

the block custom-set-variables may already exist, so just add '(truncate-lines t) to the list. This way your configuration file keeps clean.

Alternatively you could hook a keybinding, like that :

(local-set-key (kbd "C-x w") 'toggle-truncate-lines)

So you can truncate when the lines are bothering the visual