Setting Locale in Vim and Character Encoding Details

|locale| name is "ko", do this: sh: export LANG=ko csh: setenv LANG ko You can put this in your ~/.profile or ~/.cshrc file to always use it. To use a locale in Vim only, use the |:language| command: > :language ko Put this in your |init.vim| file to use it always. Or specify $LANG when starting Vim: sh: LANG=ko vim {vim-arguments} csh: env LANG=ko vim {vim-arguments} You could make a small shell script for this. ============================================================================== Encoding *mbyte-encoding* UTF-8 is always used internally to encode characters. This applies to all the places where text is used, including buffers (files loaded into memory), registers and variables. *charset* *codeset* Charset is another name for encoding. There are subtle differences, but these don't matter when using Vim. "codeset" is another similar name. Each character is encoded as one or more bytes. When all characters are encoded with one byte, we call this a single-byte encoding. The most often used one is called "latin1". This limits the number of characters to 256. Some of these are control characters, thus even fewer can be used for text. When some characters use two or more bytes, we call this a multibyte encoding. This allows using much more than 256 characters, which is required for most East Asian languages. Most multibyte encodings use one byte for the first 127 characters. These are equal to ASCII, which makes it easy to exchange plain-ASCII text, no matter what language is used. Thus you might see the right text even when the encoding was set wrong. *encoding-names* Vim can edit files in different character encodings. There are three major groups: 1 8bit Single-byte encodings, 256 different characters. Mostly used in USA and Europe. Example: ISO-8859-1 (Latin1). All characters occupy one screen cell only. 2 2byte Double-byte encodings, over 10000 different characters. Mostly used in Asian countries. Example: euc-kr (Korean) The number of screen cells is equal to the number of bytes (except for euc-jp when the first byte is 0x8e). u Unicode Universal encoding, can replace all others. ISO 10646. Millions of different characters. Example: UTF-8. The relation between bytes and screen cells is complex. Only UTF-8 is used by Vim internally. But files in other encodings can be edited by using conversion, see 'fileencoding'. Recognized 'fileencoding' values include: *encoding-values* 1 latin1 8-bit characters (ISO 8859-1, also used for cp1252) 1 iso-8859-n ISO_8859 variant (n = 2 to 15) 1 koi8-r Russian 1 koi8-u Ukrainian 1 macroman MacRoman (Macintosh encoding) 1 8bit-{name} any 8-bit encoding (Vim specific name) 1 cp437 similar to iso-8859-1 1 cp737 similar to iso-8859-7 1 cp775 Baltic 1 cp850 similar to iso-8859-4 1 cp852 similar to iso-8859-1 1 cp855 similar to iso-8859-2 1 cp857 similar to iso-8859-5 1 cp860 similar to iso-8859-9 1 cp861 similar to iso-8859-1 1 cp862 similar to iso-8859-1 1 cp863 similar to iso-8859-8 1 cp865 similar to iso-8859-1 1 cp866 similar to iso-8859-5 1 cp869 similar to iso-8859-7 1 cp874 Thai 1 cp1250 Czech, Polish, etc. 1 cp1251 Cyrillic 1 cp1253 Greek 1 cp1254 Turkish 1 cp1255 Hebrew 1 cp1256 Arabic 1 cp1257 Baltic 1 cp1258 Vietnamese 1 cp{number} MS-Windows: any installed single-byte codepage 2 cp932 Japanese (Windows only) 2 euc-jp Japanese 2 sjis Japanese 2 cp949 Korean 2 euc-kr Korean 2 cp936 simplified Chinese (Windows only) 2 euc-cn simplified Chinese 2 cp950 traditional Chinese (alias for big5) 2 big5 traditional Chinese (alias for cp950) 2 euc-tw traditional Chinese 2 2byte-{name} any double-byte encoding (Vim-specific name) 2 cp{number} MS-Windows: any installed double-byte codepage u utf-8 32 bit UTF-8 encoded Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646-1) u ucs-2 16 bit UCS-2 encoded Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646-1) u ucs-2le

The text describes how to set a locale within Vim, either by using the ':language' command in the init.vim file or by specifying the $LANG environment variable when starting Vim. It also explains character encoding, noting that Nvim internally uses UTF-8 for all text. It differentiates between single-byte and multibyte encodings, and lists recognized 'fileencoding' values. It categorizes encodings into 8-bit, 2-byte, and Unicode types.