I'm trying to set a custom breakat for plain text files. Aiming for a very small set of characters -- just hyphens, slashes, and whitespace. That means I need to add tabs, which I do by setting breakat+=^I. (Right?)At first, I didn't understand how control characters worked, and appended ^ I to my breakat value. Naturally, as a result, my files started breaking at capital I's. -_-'So then I went digging, and found this: <C-v> followed by any control key should produce the literal control character. Great! Except it seems to work on all the control characters I've tried except <C-i> (which prints a regular tab, rather than ^I with the special/bolded syntax highlighting I see for other literal control characters). What gives?(I thought maybe it was because various plugins map <C-i> to lots of things, so I moved my bundle folder elsewhere, reloaded vim, and tried again! Still no luck.)If it helps/matters, I'm running gVim 7.4 on Windows. I also found this, but <C-q><C-i> doesn't do it, either.
  not working to print literal tab!
insert mode;tab characters
You can do it like this:let &breakat = -/ \tset syntax is weird, you probably want to avoid it if possible.  Fortunately set option=... is equivalent to let &option = ..., and let syntax is nicer.  In particular let allows you to use full expressions as values, such as the above.On a related topic, setlocal option=... is equivalent to let &l:option = ....