:h usr_45.txt

usr_45.txt For Vim version 7.4. Last change: 2008 Nov 15LINK

VIM USER MANUAL - by Bram Moolenaar

Select your language

The messages in Vim can be given in several languages. This chapter explains

how to change which one is used. Also, the different ways to work with files

in various languages is explained.

45.1 Language for Messages

45.2 Language for Menus

45.3 Using another encoding

45.4 Editing files with a different encoding

45.5 Entering language text

Next chapter: usr_90.txt Installing Vim

Previous chapter: usr_44.txt Your own syntax highlighted

Table of contents: usr_toc.txt

==============================================================================

45.1 Language for MessagesLINK

When you start Vim, it checks the environment to find out what language you

are using. Mostly this should work fine, and you get the messages in your

language (if they are available). To see what the current language is, use

this command:

:language

If it replies with "C", this means the default is being used, which is

English.

Note:

Using different languages only works when Vim was compiled to handle

it. To find out if it works, use the ":version" command and check the

output for "+gettext" and "+multi_lang". If they are there, you are

OK. If you see "-gettext" or "-multi_lang" you will have to find

another Vim.

What if you would like your messages in a different language? There are

several ways. Which one you should use depends on the capabilities of your

system.

The first way is to set the environment to the desired language before

starting Vim. Example for Unix:

env LANG=de_DE.ISO_8859-1 vim

This only works if the language is available on your system. The advantage is

that all the GUI messages and things in libraries will use the right language

as well. A disadvantage is that you must do this before starting Vim. If you

want to change language while Vim is running, you can use the second method:

:language fr_FR.ISO_8859-1

This way you can try out several names for your language. You will get an

error message when it's not supported on your system. You don't get an error

when translated messages are not available. Vim will silently fall back to

using English.

To find out which languages are supported on your system, find the

directory where they are listed. On my system it is "/usr/share/locale". On

some systems it's in "/usr/lib/locale". The manual page for "setlocale"

should give you a hint where it is found on your system.

Be careful to type the name exactly as it should be. Upper and lowercase

matter, and the '-' and '_' characters are easily confused.

You can also set the language separately for messages, edited text and the

time format. See :language.

DO-IT-YOURSELF MESSAGE TRANSLATION

If translated messages are not available for your language, you could write

them yourself. To do this, get the source code for Vim and the GNU gettext

package. After unpacking the sources, instructions can be found in the

directory src/po/README.txt.

It's not too difficult to do the translation. You don't need to be a

programmer. You must know both English and the language you are translating

to, of course.

When you are satisfied with the translation, consider making it available

to others. Upload it at vim-online (http://vim.sf.net) or e-mail it to

the Vim maintainer <maintainer@vim.org>. Or both.

==============================================================================

45.2 Language for MenusLINK

The default menus are in English. To be able to use your local language, they

must be translated. Normally this is automatically done for you if the

environment is set for your language, just like with messages. You don't need

to do anything extra for this. But it only works if translations for the

language are available.

Suppose you are in Germany, with the language set to German, but prefer to

use "File" instead of "Datei". You can switch back to using the English menus

this way:

:set langmenu=none

It is also possible to specify a language:

:set langmenu=nl_NL.ISO_8859-1

Like above, differences between "-" and "_" matter. However, upper/lowercase

differences are ignored here.

The 'langmenu' option must be set before the menus are loaded. Once the

menus have been defined changing 'langmenu' has no direct effect. Therefore,

put the command to set 'langmenu' in your vimrc file.

If you really want to switch menu language while running Vim, you can do it

this way:

:source $VIMRUNTIME/delmenu.vim

:set langmenu=de_DE.ISO_8859-1

:source $VIMRUNTIME/menu.vim

There is one drawback: All menus that you defined yourself will be gone. You

will need to redefine them as well.

DO-IT-YOURSELF MENU TRANSLATION

To see which menu translations are available, look in this directory:

$VIMRUNTIME/lang

The files are called menu_{language}.vim. If you don't see the language you

want to use, you can do your own translations. The simplest way to do this is

by copying one of the existing language files, and change it.

First find out the name of your language with the ":language" command. Use

this name, but with all letters made lowercase. Then copy the file to your

own runtime directory, as found early in 'runtimepath'. For example, for Unix

you would do:

:!cp $VIMRUNTIME/lang/menu_ko_kr.euckr.vim ~/.vim/lang/menu_nl_be.iso_8859-1.vim

You will find hints for the translation in "$VIMRUNTIME/lang/README.txt".

==============================================================================

45.3 Using another encodingLINK

Vim guesses that the files you are going to edit are encoded for your

language. For many European languages this is "latin1". Then each byte is

one character. That means there are 256 different characters possible. For

Asian languages this is not sufficient. These mostly use a double-byte

encoding, providing for over ten thousand possible characters. This still

isn't enough when a text is to contain several different languages. This is

where Unicode comes in. It was designed to include all characters used in

commonly used languages. This is the "Super encoding that replaces all

others". But it isn't used that much yet.

Fortunately, Vim supports these three kinds of encodings. And, with some

restrictions, you can use them even 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.

Note:

Using different encodings only works when Vim was compiled to handle

it. To find out if it works, use the ":version" command and check the

output for "+multi_byte". If it's there, you are OK. If you see

"-multi_byte" you will have to find another Vim.

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. If you don't have this font, you might

find it here:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz

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. If Microsoft didn't move it,

you can find it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/default.aspx

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

Unicode font. Typed characters still arrive in the encoding of your original

language. This requires converting them to Unicode. Tell Vim the language

from which to convert with the 'termencoding' option. You can do it like

this:

:let &termencoding = &encoding

:set encoding=utf-8

This assigns the old value of 'encoding' to 'termencoding' before setting

'encoding' to utf-8. You will have to try out if this really works for your

setup. It should work especially well when using an input method for an Asian

language, and you want to edit Unicode text.

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. See

UTF8-xterm how to check that and how to compile it when needed.

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. Set 'encoding' to "utf-8" as

before. That's all.

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.

:let &termencoding = &encoding

:set encoding=utf-8

This is the same as what was used for the GUI. But it works differently: Vim

will convert the displayed text before sending it to the terminal. That

avoids that the display is messed up with strange characters.

For this to work the conversion between 'termencoding' and 'encoding' must

be possible. Vim will convert from latin1 to Unicode, thus that always works.

For other conversions the +iconv feature is required.

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:

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 'viminfo' 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 encodingLINK

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 the file to see

if it's one of these encodings:

ucs-bom File must start with a Byte Order Mark (BOM). This

allows detection of 16-bit, 32-bit and utf-8 Unicode

encodings.

utf-8 utf-8 Unicode. This is rejected when a sequence of

bytes is illegal in utf-8.

latin1 The good old 8-bit encoding. Always works.

When you start editing that 16-bit Unicode file, and it has a BOM, Vim will

detect this and convert the file to utf-8 when reading it. The 'fileencoding'

option (without s at the end) is set to the detected value. In this case it

is "utf-16le". That means it's Unicode, 16-bit and little-endian. This

file format is common on MS-Windows (e.g., for registry files).

When writing the file, Vim will compare 'fileencoding' with 'encoding'. If

they are different, the text will be converted.

An empty value for 'fileencoding' means that no conversion is to be done.

Thus the text is assumed to be encoded with 'encoding'.

If the default 'fileencodings' value is not good for you, set it to the

encodings you want Vim to try. Only when a value is found to be invalid will

the next one be used. Putting "latin1" first doesn't work, because it is

never illegal. An example, to fall back to Japanese when the file doesn't

have a BOM and isn't utf-8:

:set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,sjis

See encoding-values for suggested values. Other values may work as well.

This depends on the conversion available.

FORCING AN ENCODING

If the automatic detection doesn't work you must tell Vim what encoding the

file is. Example:

:edit ++enc=koi8-r russian.txt

The "++enc" part specifies the name of the encoding to be used for this file

only. Vim will convert the file from the specified encoding, Russian in this

example, to 'encoding'. 'fileencoding' will also be set to the specified

encoding, so that the reverse conversion can be done when writing the file.

The same argument can be used when writing the file. This way you can

actually use Vim to convert a file. Example:

:write ++enc=utf-8 russian.txt

Note:

Conversion may result in lost characters. Conversion from an encoding

to Unicode and back is mostly free of this problem, unless there are

illegal characters. Conversion from Unicode to other encodings often

loses information when there was more than one language in the file.

==============================================================================

45.5 Entering language textLINK

Computer keyboards don't have much more than a hundred keys. Some languages

have thousands of characters, Unicode has over 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. For details see mbyte-XIM for the X Window system and

mbyte-IME for MS-Windows.

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 "~/.vim/keymap".

The name of the keymap file must look like this:

keymap/{name}.vim

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.

==============================================================================

Next chapter: usr_90.txt Installing Vim