title: Formatting text in VIM while preserving newlines
body: <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/jOGZK.gif" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I have a bunch of markdown files that I want to reformat to maximize the textwidth. My <code>fo</code> are set to:</p>
  
  <pre><code>formatoptions=2tcqn
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>those options stand for:</p>
  
  <pre><code>t   Auto-wrap text using textwidth
  c   Auto-wrap comments using textwidth, inserting the current comment
      leader automatically.
  q   Allow formatting of comments with "gq".
  n   When formatting text, recognize numbered lists
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><code>textwidth</code> is also set to a reasonable value.  </p>
  
  <p>The problem I have is when I try to format multiple paragraphs containing linebreaks with trailing spaces (which is the markdown way to break a line). Those linebreaks are removed when formating using <code>gq</code>.<br>
  Is there a way to tell VIM to leave those linebreaks (including the trailing whitespaces) alone?</p>
  
  <p>P.S. in the animated gif I first select the whole paragraph using <code>vap</code> and then use <code>gq</code> to format it. Since this does not yield the desired behavior, I revert the changes and perform the formatting linewise.</p>