How to view UTF-8 Characters in Vim or gVim

Question

I work on webpages involving non-English scripts from time to time, most of them are encoded using UTF-8.

Vim and gVim do not display those UTF-8 characters correctly.

I'm using Vim 7.3.46 on Windows 7, 64-bit, with set guifont=Monaco:h10 in _vimrc.

Is there a way to fix this?

Update: I've googled around and found set guifontwide acts as second fallback for regional languages.

I added the following lines to _vimrc and most of my problems got solved.

set enc=utf-8
set fileencoding=utf-8
set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf8,prc
set guifont=Monaco:h11
set guifontwide=NSimsun:h12

The above NSimsun font works for Chinese, The problem is, I don't know how they got the font name to work with Vim, Courier New is mentioned as Courier_New also NSimsun is nowhere in the font directory. The font I want to use is Latha But, I don't know how to use it in the _vimrc file. set guifontwide=latha:h12 or set guifontwide=Latha:h12 doesn't work.

If I successfully set the guifontwide to latha , then my problem will be solved. How to do it?

Answer 1

Did you try

:set encoding=utf-8
:set fileencoding=utf-8

?

Answer 2

Try to reload the document using:

:e! ++enc=utf8

If that works you should maybe change the fileencodings settings in your .vimrc.

Answer 3

If Japanese people come here, please add the following lines to your ~/.vimrc

set encoding=utf-8
set fileencodings=iso-2022-jp,euc-jp,sjis,utf-8
set fileformats=unix,dos,mac

Answer 4

On Microsoft Windows, gvim wouldn't allow you to select non-monospaced fonts. Unfortunately Latha is a non-monospaced font.

There is a hack way to make it happen: Using FontForge (you can download Windows binary from http://www.geocities.jp/meir000/fontforge/ ) to edit the Latha.ttf and mark it as a monospaced font. Doing like this:

1. Load fontforge, select latha.ttf.
2. Menu: Element -> Font Info
3. Select "OS/2" from left-hand list on Font Info dialog
4. Select "Panose" tab
5. Set Proportion = Monospaced
6. Save new TTF version of this font, try it out!

Good luck!

Answer 5

这对我有用，不需要更改任何配置文件

vim --cmd "set encoding=utf8" --cmd "set fileencoding=utf8" fileToOpen

Answer 6

In Linux, Open the VIM configuration file

$ sudo -H gedit /etc/vim/vimrc

Added following lines:

set fileencodings=utf-8,ucs-bom,gb18030,gbk,gb2312,cp936
set termencoding=utf-8
set encoding=utf-8

Save and exit, and terminal command:

$ source /etc/vim/vimrc

At this time VIM will correctly display Chinese.

Answer 7

Is this problem solved meanwhile?

I had the problem that gvim didn't display all unicode characters (but only a subset, including the umlauts and accented characters), while :set guifont? was empty; see my question . After reading here, setting the guifont to a sensible value fixed it for me. However, I don't need characters beyond 2 bytes.

Answer 8

I couldn't get any other fonts I installed to show up in my Windows GVim editor, so I just switched to Lucida Console which has at least somewhat better UTF-8 support. Add this to the end of your _vimrc :

" For making everything utf-8
set enc=utf-8
set guifont=Lucida_Console:h9:cANSI
set guifontwide=Lucida_Console:h12

Now I see at least some UTF-8 characters.

Answer 9

在 Windows gvim 上，只需选择“Lucida Console”字体。