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

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.