when your environment uses another
language than the text.
   Nevertheless, when you only edit files that are in the encoding of your
language, the default should work fine and you don't need to do anything.  The
following is only relevant when you want to edit different languages.


USING UNICODE IN THE GUI

The nice thing about Unicode is that other encodings can be converted to it
and back without losing information.  When you make Vim use Unicode
internally, you will be able to edit files in any encoding.
   Unfortunately, the number of systems supporting Unicode is still limited.
Thus it's unlikely that your language uses it.  You need to tell Vim you want
to use Unicode, and how to handle interfacing with the rest of the system.
   Let's start with the GUI version of Vim, which is able to display Unicode
characters.  This should work: >

	:set encoding=utf-8
	:set guifont=-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1

The 'encoding' option tells Vim the encoding of the characters that you use.
This applies to the text in buffers (files you are editing), registers, Vim
script files, etc.  You can regard 'encoding' as the setting for the internals
of Vim.
   This example assumes you have this font on your system.  The name in the
example is for the X Window System.  This font is in a package that is used to
enhance xterm with Unicode support.

For MS-Windows, some fonts have a limited number of Unicode characters.  Try
using the "Courier New" font.  You can use the Edit/Select Font... menu to
select and try out the fonts available.  Only fixed-width fonts can be used
though.  Example: >

	:set guifont=courier_new:h12

If it doesn't work well, try getting a fontpack.

Now you have told Vim to use Unicode internally and display text with a
Unicode font.

USING UNICODE IN A UNICODE TERMINAL

There are terminals that support Unicode directly.  The standard xterm that
comes with XFree86 is one of them.  Let's use that as an example.
   First of all, the xterm must have been compiled with Unicode support.
   Start the xterm with the "-u8" argument.  You might also need so specify a
font.  Example: >

   xterm -u8 -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1

Now you can run Vim inside this terminal.


USING UNICODE IN AN ORDINARY TERMINAL

Suppose you want to work with Unicode files, but don't have a terminal with
Unicode support.  You can do this with Vim, although characters that are not
supported by the terminal will not be displayed.  The layout of the text
will be preserved.

Try editing a file with Unicode characters in it.  You will notice that Vim
will put a question mark (or underscore or some other character) in places
where a character should be that the terminal can't display.  Move the cursor
to a question mark and use this command: >

	ga

Vim will display a line with the code of the character.  This gives you a hint
about what character it is.  You can look it up in a Unicode table.  You could
actually view a file that way, if you have lots of time at hand.

	Note:
	Since 'encoding' is used for all text inside Vim, changing it makes
	all non-ASCII text invalid.  You will notice this when using registers
	and the |shada-file| (e.g., a remembered search pattern).  It's
	recommended to set 'encoding' in your vimrc file, and leave it alone.

==============================================================================
*45.4*	Editing files with a different encoding

Suppose you have setup Vim to use Unicode, and you want to edit a file that is
in 16-bit Unicode.  Sounds simple, right?  Well, Vim actually uses utf-8
encoding internally, thus the 16-bit encoding must be converted, since there
is a difference between the character set (Unicode) and the encoding (utf-8 or
16-bit).
   Vim will try to detect what kind of file you are editing.  It uses the
encoding names in the 'fileencodings' option.  When using Unicode, the default
value is: "ucs-bom,utf-8,latin1".  This means that Vim checks