Vim doesn't support unicode?

Question

I'm trying to get the following into my .vimrc

" Use the same symbols as TextMate for tabstops and EOLs
set listchars=tab:▸\ ,eol:¬

Those lines are from here are worked perfectly in vim 7.2 I recently compiled and installed vim 7.3 and now those characters aren't understood by vim. Also: Ctrl+V then U in insert doesn't let me insert any characters, it just seems to ignore that.

Any ideas?

This is what I see: set listchars=tab:�~V�\ ,eol:¬

Answer 1

Do you need a

scriptencoding utf-8

or whatever encoding your .vimrc is actually in?

Answer 2

I have the following in my .vimrc

scriptencoding utf-8
set encoding=utf-8

and that in my .gvimrc

set listchars=trail:·,precedes:«,extends:»,eol:↲,tab:▸\ 

and works fine(notice there is a space after the ▸\ ).

Answer 3

You need to compile vim with multi-byte support.

The easiest way to do this is to run

./configure --with-features=big
make

This will build vim with the correct support.

You can verify that it was compiled correctly with

:version

in vim or by running

vim --version

and looking for +multi_byte. If it says -multi_byte it will not work.