Keymaps, DIY Keymaps, and Last Resort Character Input

hundred thousand. So how do you type these characters? First of all, when you don't use too many of the special characters, you can use digraphs. This was already explained in |24.9|. When you use a language that uses many more characters than keys on your keyboard, you will want to use an Input Method (IM). This requires learning the translation from typed keys to resulting character. When you need an IM you probably already have one on your system. It should work with Vim like with other programs. KEYMAPS For some languages the character set is different from latin, but uses a similar number of characters. It's possible to map keys to characters. Vim uses keymaps for this. Suppose you want to type Hebrew. You can load the keymap like this: > :set keymap=hebrew Vim will try to find a keymap file for you. This depends on the value of 'encoding'. If no matching file was found, you will get an error message. Now you can type Hebrew in Insert mode. In Normal mode, and when typing a ":" command, Vim automatically switches to English. You can use this command to switch between Hebrew and English: > CTRL-^ This only works in Insert mode and Command-line mode. In Normal mode it does something completely different (jumps to alternate file). The usage of the keymap is indicated in the mode message, if you have the 'showmode' option set. In the GUI Vim will indicate the usage of keymaps with a different cursor color. You can also change the usage of the keymap with the 'iminsert' and 'imsearch' options. To see the list of mappings, use this command: > :lmap To find out which keymap files are available, in the GUI you can use the Edit/Keymap menu. Otherwise you can use this command: > :echo globpath(&rtp, "keymap/*.vim") DO-IT-YOURSELF KEYMAPS You can create your own keymap file. It's not very difficult. Start with a keymap file that is similar to the language you want to use. Copy it to the "keymap" directory in your runtime directory. For example, for Unix, you would use the directory "~/.config/nvim/keymap". The name of the keymap file must look like this: keymap/{name}.vim ~ or keymap/{name}_{encoding}.vim ~ {name} is the name of the keymap. Chose a name that is obvious, but different from existing keymaps (unless you want to replace an existing keymap file). {name} cannot contain an underscore. Optionally, add the encoding used after an underscore. Examples: keymap/hebrew.vim ~ keymap/hebrew_utf-8.vim ~ The contents of the file should be self-explanatory. Look at a few of the keymaps that are distributed with Vim. For the details, see |mbyte-keymap|. LAST RESORT If all other methods fail, you can enter any character with CTRL-V: encoding type range ~ 8-bit CTRL-V 123 decimal 0-255 8-bit CTRL-V x a1 hexadecimal 00-ff 16-bit CTRL-V u 013b hexadecimal 0000-ffff 31-bit CTRL-V U 001303a4 hexadecimal 00000000-7fffffff Don't type the spaces. See |i_CTRL-V_digit| for the details. ============================================================================== Copyright: see |manual-copyright| vim:tw=78:ts=8:noet:ft=help:norl:

This section discusses how to use keymaps in Vim for typing languages with different character sets. It explains loading keymaps with ":set keymap=name" and using CTRL-^ to switch between languages in Insert and Command-line modes. It also covers how to create custom keymap files and where to save them. Finally, it describes using CTRL-V followed by decimal or hexadecimal values as a last resort method for entering any character, providing different formats depending on the encoding.