Input Special / Foreign / Non-Keyboard Characters - Vim Tips (2)

The SECOND video in a brand NEW show about Vim.
This series will provide small easily consumable Tips & Tricks in Vim to help you become a better Vim-er and is for Beginners & Intermediate Vim users alike. The aim is to hopefully expose/highlight some of Vim's massive (maybe even lesser known) functionality with explanations & examples.

[ Feel free to skip to 01:16 for the actual start of the video content... ]

In this episode I show you that you how you can type special characters into Vim, especially the characters / letters / symbols and shapes that can't be found on a standard keyboard. I start by explaining briefly the concept of character encoding that computers use to match letters and characters to numerical values and show you how you can input boring old letters, like e, into vim using it's decimal & hexadecimal value instead.

After that I then show you the incredibly powerful functionality that already exists in Vim called DIGRAPHS, which is a really easy and handy way to type into vim a selection of characters that aren't easily accessible on a standard keyboard, like foreign characters from a range of different language character sets, some mathematical symbols, shapes and even strange block characters and playing card suite characters.

These Digraphs are simple patterns that match the shape/symbol you are trying to type in visually correct way or in a way that is easier to remember than a bunch of numbers, for example the german u with an umlaut character (ü) can be typed using its digraph which looks like this (u:), so a much easier way of inputting and remembering how to input those characters.

Finally towards the end of the video I cover, Emojis / Emoticons of course and how you can enter those into Vim too, using the knowledge learnt earlier in the video. Basically with this video you can enter ANY unicode character into Vim with a variety of methods!

Links from the video OR to learn more ======================

Tom Scott's Video about ASCII, UNICODE & Character Encoding (Computerphile Channel):

ASCII table:

What is Unicode:

Vim Digraphs:

Emoji/Emoticon lookup website:

ANOTHER Emoji/Emoticon lookup website:

Vim Plugin for emojis on Github (recommend):

Entering Special Characters in Vim:

Inserting unicode characters in Vim:

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Thank you so much for watching. Feel free to reach out to me on my socials (below) with any questions or ideas for future videos...

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Tools:
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Camera: Canon M50

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Credits:
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In Video Background: Photo by Adrien Olichon from Pexels

Vid: 32

#Vim #VimTips #SpecialCharactersInVim

[alexk]

You said beginner to intermediate and then you give this amazing pro level tip. I've been watching vim tutorials for 3 years now and it amazes me that this is the first time I hear about what ctrl+v really does.. Because of course I've pressed it a million times by accident and saw the ^ symbol waiting making me think I made a paste that doesn't work..

[Lockjaw]

Seriously one of the most useful Vim videos I've seen. Never knew about :dig

[jndominica]

The charmap is neat. But jesus, it still looks like a DOS editor but with newfangled colored symbols.