You can do set number
to show the line number at the beginning of each line. However, in original vi, there doesn't seem to be an option to show the current column.
There is a way to at least position the cursor at a specific column. Do 25|
to position the cursor at column 25 of the current line.
When Vim reads an existing file, it tries to detect the file encoding. When writing out the file, Vim uses the file encoding that it detected (except when you tell it differently). So a file detected as UTF-8 is written as UTF-8, a file detected as Latin-1 is written as Latin-1, and so on.
By default, the detection process is crude. Every file that you open with Vim will be assumed to be Latin-1, unless it detects a Unicode byte-order mark at the top. A UTF-8 file without a byte-order mark will be hard to edit because any multibyte characters will be shown in the buffer as character sequences instead of single characters.
Worse, Vim, by default, uses Latin-1 to represent the text in the buffer. So a UTF-8 file with a byte-order mark will be corrupted by down-conversion to Latin-1.
The solution is to configure Vim to use UTF-8 internally. This is, in fact, recommended in the Vim documentation, and the only reason it is not configured that way out of the box is to avoid creating enormous confusion among users who expect Vim to operate basically as a Latin-1 editor.
In your .vimrc
, add set encoding=utf-8
and restart Vim.
Or instead, set the LANG
environment variable to indicate that UTF-8
is your preferred character encoding. This will affect not just Vim
but any software which relies on LANG
to determine how it should
represent text. For example, to indicate that text should appear in
English (en
), as spoken in the United States (US
), encoded as UTF-8
(utf-8
), set LANG=en_US.utf-8
.
Now Vim will use UTF-8 to represent the text in the buffer. Plus, it will also make a more determined effort to detect the UTF-8 encoding in a file. Besides looking for a byte-order mark, it will also check for UTF-8 without a byte-order mark before falling back to Latin-1. So it will no longer corrupt a file coded in UTF-8, and it should properly display the UTF-8 characters during the editing session.
For more information on how Vim detects the file encoding, see the
fileencodings
option in the Vim
documentation.
For more information on setting the encoding that Vim uses
internally, see the encoding
option.
If you need to override the encoding used when writing a file back
to disk, see the fileencoding
option.
Best Answer
The built-in
spellfile.vim
script will attempt to download missing spell files from http://ftp.vim.org/vim/runtime/spell.In general, spell checking is not supported for East Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese, because individual words are not separated by whitespace, so a different algorithm would be needed.
You probably want to
to avoid highlighting those. From
:help 'spelllang'
: