vim digraphs: ♥

[shadowspar]

First thing. For those who use vim but might not have known about it: vim has a feature called digraphs which gives you a way to enter letters with diacritics (eg ä), symbols (eg ✓), and other characters that aren't on your keyboard. It does have its idiosyncracies, but it's fairly reasonable once you start to toy with it a bit.

How it works: first, enter the compose key, which by default is Control-K. Then enter the two characters of the digraph, and you'll get the single character that's defined in the digraphs table for that particular combination.

So, for instance:

• Ctrl-K + o + - ⇒ ō
• Ctrl-K + e + : ⇒ ë
• Ctrl-K + c + , ⇒ ç
• Ctrl-K + o + C ⇒ ℃
• Ctrl-K + P + d ⇒ £
• Ctrl-K + 1 + 2 ⇒ ½

The command :digraphs will show you everything in the digraphs table.

Last thing and the point of all that preparatory context above: there is a terrible problem with the set of digraphs as it ships with vim. Clearly the sequence < + 3 should compose to the character ♥, but it doesn't by default. To remedy this horrible shortcoming, add the line

digraph <3 9829

to your vim config file. (9829 is the unicode decimal identifier for the character ♥.)

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Ooooh this is a very cool post. Mind if I share with command_liners?

[shadowspar]

Thanks! And please do! =D

all the years of vi and vim

[babysprite]

For all the years I've been using vi and (later) vim, it never ceases to impress (or even amaze) me all can be done with what I'd like to think is the most versatile and powerful programmer's text editor in existence. I'm actually using it to comment on this post with the w3m WEB browser.

Thank you for posting this and Happy Friday everybody!

/\__/\
(='.'=)
(")_(")

Plain text is beautiful.

Re: all the years of vi and vim

[shadowspar]

Hee! Cheers from a fellow (though occasional) w3m user.

[shadowspar]

Oh, and BTW, thanks for the pointer to this comm! *joins*

[floatboth]

Wow, very importa- wait, actually, no. The last time I entered non-ASCII characters in vim was… oh, right, when I was writing that unit test for transliteration.

That's just "nice to have". Like that feature of TextMate, Emacs w/ an add-on and Sublime Text 2 when you can drag a file into the editor and it'll insert the appropriate snippet, like, dragging an image into html code = img src="that_image.png". Never actually used it.

[shadowspar]

Eh, YMMV. It's not something that's great for entering, say, swaths of Japanese (you want an IME or some such for that), but I find it handy for things like accents/diacritics. Si on écrivait en français, on l'utiliserait beaucoup.

Also, characters like ½, ℉, and © don't seem to be defined by default in any input method editor I've seen yet. I use the former two a lot in writing recipes, f'rinstance.

[floatboth]

No, I mean, I don't use vim for anything other than code.

[shadowspar]

Yeah, I use vim for pretty much any text I write -- code, articles, blog posts, essays, theses, whatever. Even wiki pages and other things you write in a textarea in a web browser, as I note below. =)

[brownbetty]

I find digraphs slightly more intuitive than any other method of entering accented characters, such that I actually installed digraph support for Firefox, such that I can use digraphs in any firefox text area. Wööt!

[shadowspar]

Heh, we've gotten to the same place by taking different roads. I've installed the It's All Text plugin, which lets you edit Firefox textareas using an external editor of your choice -- in my case, vim. =)

[brownbetty]

I'm a terrible command-liner: I have itsalltext installed, but I usually use it to edit in geany. What kind of arguments do you use to launch vim in a terminal, anyway? Or are you browsing from a text-only browser already?

[shadowspar]

What I've done is instead of bothering with the magic necessary to launch vim in a terminal, I just run the GUI version of vim instead (gvim).

What platform are you using itsalltext on? On my linux box, I just tell itsalltext to run /usr/bin/gvim. On the Mac, calling gvim directly doesn't work for some reason; instead you have to tell itsalltext to use /usr/bin/open and then, in Finder, configure vim as the default app used to open text files. (open is the OS X command that opens a file with whatever app is configured to open it, just as if you'd double-clicked its icon in the Finder.)

[brownbetty]

I'm capable of using vim in a hunt and peck sort of way, but I'm pretty chary of it. But yeah, I use itsalltext on my linux boxes.

[shadowspar]

For anyone who happens across this post later in time, here are a few more useful digraphs that my .vimrc has accumulated...

" by default, .. gives you ‥
" …but I would rather it produce a three-dot ellipsis:
digraph .. 8230       " …

" everyone needs interrobangs sometimes =)
digraph !? 8253       " ‽
digraph ?! 8253       " ‽

" if you write Romanian, you may want to change the s, and t, digraphs…
" by default they give you a cedilla underneath, but in Romanian,
" it actually should be a comma, not a cedilla
digraph S, 536        " Ș
digraph s, 537        " ș 
digraph T, 538        " Ț
digraph t, 539        " ț 

" new Indian Rupee sign; doesn't seem to come by default =(
digraph Rs 8377       " ₹