Statusline wrong column count for multi-byte characters

Question

I have set this statusline.

:set statusline=%c

According to :help statusline, %c means column number. If the buffer contents is

abcdef
éÀ│§õ→

and the cursor is on the f character, the statusline correctly reports "6". But if on the arrow character, it reports "12" instead of "6", certainly because it is counting bytes instead of characters (éÀ§õ→ are 2 bytes each and │ is 3 bytes).

The file encoding is correct:

:set encoding?
encoding=utf-8

Is it possible to workaround that and have the column count instead of the byte count? I have thought of using the %{ } construct with the Unix wc -m command to count characters, but I cannot devise a plan to put all the pieces together, if it is possible at all.

PS: The 5| normal mode command correctly moves to the 5th column on both lines.

Answer 1

Well, it looks the answer is as simple as

:set statusline=%v

That uses the virtual column number instead of the column number.

Thanks to D. Ben Knoble for pointing me in the right direction.