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 uses utf-8 charset, VIM and Gvim does not display UTF-8 Characters correctly.

Using

Answer 1

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 2

On Windows gvim just select "Lucida Console" font.

Answer 3

Did you try

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

?

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

this work for me and do not need change any config file

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

Answer 6

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.