Quoting Ken Bloom (kabloom@ucdavis.edu):
> I use gq} I don't know whether you'll find it to be less or more of a
> pain.
Ditto (in vim). And this entry in ~/.vimrc has proved handy:
map Q gq
Thus, "Q}" reformats the current paragraph (in my case, to
72-column-or-fewer lines -- see below), which vim does pretty
intelligently and reliably. It's not perfect, but it's close enough
that I've never felt compelled to seek a more-complex solution.
Other .vimrc stuff:
set nocompatible " Use Vim defaults (much better!)
set bs=2 " allow backspacing over everything in insert mode
set noai " set autoindenting off
set tw=72 " always limit the width of text to 72
set backup " keep a backup file
set viminfo='20,\"50 " read/write a .viminfo file, don't store more
" than 50 lines of registers