How do I turn on text wrapping by default in VS Code

In 2020, here are simple steps to do it.

• Click on 'File' on the top menu.
• Click on 'Preferences' --> 'Settings'.
• Scroll a little bit until you find 'Editor: Word Wrap'.
• Click on the dropdown menu and choose 'on'.
• Done. Settings will be saved by default.

Hope this helps.

The setting is now "editor.wordWrap": "on", which should be set to "on" (the default value is "off").

Switching to "on" activates word wrap on all documents in Visual Studio Code.

See the release notes about Word Wrap changes for more info.

Have a look at the setting editor.wrappingColumn (see the docs for more information)

Update 2017-04-06:

Recently the setting changed (see here) to editor.wordWrap with several options:

We therefore decided to deprecate editor.wrappingColumn (with its -1, 0, >0 cases) in favor of editor.wordWrap.

Here are the new word wrap options:

editor.wordWrap: "off" - Lines will never wrap.
editor.wordWrap: "on" - Lines will wrap at viewport width.
editor.wordWrap: "wordWrapColumn" - Lines will wrap at the value of editor.wordWrapColumn.
editor.wordWrap: "bounded" - Lines will wrap at the minimum of viewport width and the value of editor.wordWrapColumn.

Version 1.32.3

If you don't want to edit any files you can just turn it on under user settings:

Code > Preferences > Settings > Text Editor

Type "wordwrap" in the search or scroll to bottom of the list just before the cursor section. You'll see it as "Word Wrap / Controls how lines should wrap."