30
votes
Accepted
How do I keep accidentally creating a no break space before opening curly brace?
Others have already provided work-arounds, but as for the reason why it happens, I bet you're accidentally pressing Alt+Space.
I'm using Xubuntu with the 105-key Finnish keyboard layout myself, so ...
- 416
20
votes
How do I keep accidentally creating a no break space before opening curly brace?
You can add an autocommand that replaces non-breaking spaces with regular ones upon saving particular file types, eg. by putting something like this in your vimrc:
augroup RemoveSpaces
autocmd!
...
- 460
17
votes
Accepted
What does CTRL-K do in insertion mode?
It allows you to enter a digraph — it's a method of entering a more extensive range of Unicode characters using pairs of keystrokes. (See :h digraphs)
For future reference, you can ...
- 32.6k
16
votes
How do I keep accidentally creating a no break space before opening curly brace?
The 'listchars' option provides a means to make 'list' display non-breaking spaces. It's not set by default, so you probably want to add it.
set listchars+=nbsp:‗
- 11.2k
13
votes
Accepted
move forward by a certain number of chars or bytes?
To go to the Nth byte in the file: use :go N, :Ngo, or Ngo (normal mode).
To move N bytes ahead, you could use something like this :exe 'go' line2byte(line("."))+col(".")-1+N
Unless you have ...
- 14.4k
10
votes
Accepted
How to show illegal whitespace (such as unbreakable space) in source code?
List & Listchars
'list' is a boolean option that, when set, instructs vim to display whitespace characters. And it is completely customizable using 'listchars'.
For example, to show non-breaking ...
- 27.7k
9
votes
Accepted
Replace nbsp with none string in utf-8 encoding in vim
You almost never need to deal with the binary UTF-8 encoding in Vim (or indeed, almost anywhere, including programming languages); for the most part you can just forget it exists as Vim takes cares of ...
- 63.3k
8
votes
Accepted
How can I get the character at the cursor position in a multibyte aware manner?
We discussed it less then 10 days ago on reddit.
One solution is matchstr(getline('.'), '\%'.col('.').'c.') which doesn't mess with any register.
I've put the resulting functions (we can ask for the ...
- 17.8k
6
votes
Printing unicode chars?
Not trivially, but as a workaround, you can convert to HTML then print that from a browser. For example, on a Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux distro:
:TOhtml | w | !x-www-browser %
This might work for ...
- 161
6
votes
Accepted
(How) can I convert full-width characters to half-width ones?
There you go:
:%s/[\uff01-\uff5e]/\=nr2char(char2nr(submatch(0))-65248)/g
This matches the range of full-width characters, and via :help sub-replace-expr and char2nr() converts this to a number, ...
- 18k
6
votes
Inserting the content of a register where a macro is recorded results in control characters becoming unicode characters
The ^[<80><fd>a sequence is a <Nop>, which means Vim recognizes this key sequence as valid, but it produces no action at all.
The reason why Vim will insert a <Nop> right after ...
- 29.9k
6
votes
Accepted
Inserting special characters like x̄ X̄ that aren't in the digraph table?
The issue with x̄ is that it's actually made of two separate characters, U+0078 (lowercase x) followed by U+0304 "Combining Macron".
The Vim digraph system can only be used to insert a ...
- 29.9k
5
votes
Accepted
Can you match unicode blocks by name in vim?
Vim has its own regex engine and it doesn't support {Cyrillic}.
You probably want to read :h pattern-atoms and :h /character-classes to find out what you can use in your regexes.
I think the best ...
- 50.6k
5
votes
Matching any Unicode whitespace
You asked for elegant, but got no answer... so here's the non-elegant way, listing all 25 characters defined as whitespace:
\(\%u0009\|\%u000A\|\%u000B\|\%u000C\|\%u000D\|\%u0020\|\%u0085\|\%u00A0\|\%...
- 151
5
votes
Accepted
Do not red underline unicode control points as misspelled words
As mentioned in the comment, the spell checking engine does work on the bytes in the buffer and therefore considers the combining characters as part of the item to spell check.
Interestingly, ...
- 26.5k
4
votes
Can I write Japanese (SKK) text in Vim?
Since I was in search for a good way to input unicode Japanese characters in
VIM, this post was really helpful. I tried using skk.vim but found it really
difficult, because contrary to the OP, I ...
- 141
4
votes
How to interpret ASCII codes returned by "ga" command?
Vim is using Unicode (probably UTF-8), but Excel and/or Access are using Windows-1252 (or possibly a related Windows code page such as 1251 or 1253). Decimal 8216 is hexadecimal 2018, thus ‘ is ...
- 1,050
4
votes
How can I get the character at the cursor position in a multibyte aware manner?
The following works and is faster than the matchstr() solution:
fun! Getchar()
return strcharpart(strpart(getline('.'), col('.') - 1), 0, 1)
endfun
nnoremap GG :echo Getchar()<CR>
See my ...
- 9,417
4
votes
Accepted
Highlight Unicode Characters
With the help from Konfekt/vim-unicode-homoglyphs and the answers here I found this solution that works quite well and has (almost?) no performance impact:
augroup Hiunicode
autocmd!
autocmd ...
- 2,983
3
votes
Accepted
Detect if Vim can show utf8 characters
You can test the 'encoding' option. For example I have this in my .vimrc
if &encoding == "utf-8"
if !exists("$PUTTY_TERM") && $OS isnot# "Windows_NT"
exe "set listchars=nbsp:\...
- 26.5k
3
votes
Printing unicode chars?
Per this Stackoverflow:4586628 Q/A, How do you pipe a vim buffer through lpr?, I have this entry in my ~/.vimrc:
nmap PpP :%w !lpr -o lpi=8 -o cpi=14<CR><CR>
that replaces my old entry,
...
- 171
3
votes
How can I get the character at the cursor position in a multibyte aware manner?
If you have the patch 8.2.2324, you can use the charcol() function in a :def function:
def Getchar(): string
return getline('.')[charcol('.') - 1]
enddef
nnoremap GG :echom Getchar()<CR>
It ...
- 6,032
3
votes
Displaying terms as single character unicode symbols in VIM?
You can do this with Vim syntax's conceal feature, which allows you to hide matched text or replace it with a single character:
:syntax match keyword "\<lambda\>" conceal cchar=λ
:set ...
- 32.6k
3
votes
Can I write Japanese (SKK) text in Vim?
I'm trying to summarize here the experience of the other two users, while trying to keep it simple. Some issues were resolved (e.g. eskk now supports nvim). Also, I'm using pathogen which somewhat ...
- 359
3
votes
Accepted
How to express an unicode code points set in match command?
The syntax for unicode characters inside [] is different, you just omit the %:
match ChineseMark /[\u3000\uff01-\uff5e]/
\%uxxxx is an atom while \uff01 is character in a collection. You cannot use ...
- 14.4k
3
votes
How to show illegal whitespace (such as unbreakable space) in source code?
You can use
:syntax match ErrorMsg " "
while inserting an unbreakable space between the "'s.
To automatically load the rule, you can simply add
au VimEnter,BufWinEnter * syn match ErrorMsg " "
to ...
- 196
3
votes
Accepted
How can I search for Unicode characters by hex code in very magic regexes in vimscript?
Turns out the "how" answer is very simple: In very-magic mode, % is already magical. Therefore, instead of \%u4e2d, %u4e2d (no backslash) works fine! In full, that's
/\v%u4e2d<CR>
- 974
3
votes
Accepted
How to conceal zerowidth special characters like <U200C>
:syntax match ZeroWidthNonJoiner "[\u200c]" conceal cchar=😄
You need to check :h conceallevel, I set it to 2 personally. Otherwise, you may not get conceal to work as you expect.
- 276
3
votes
Display superscript of multiple characters to express a mathematical exponent
Vim only ships digraphs for the superscripts for 1 through 3.
You can find the additional superscripts for 4 through 9 and 0 in the Unicode ranges U+2074 through U+2079 and U+2070, which you can ...
- 29.9k
3
votes
Vimscript to replace persian/arabic digits with english ones
Use the following :s command for Persian and Urdu digits:
:%s/\([۰-۹]\)/\=char2nr(submatch(1))-1776/g
And the following for Arabic digits:
:%s/\([۰-۹]\)/\=char2nr(submatch(1))-1536/g
- 427
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible