How to insert Unicode character U+2611 in gvim

Question

when I try to enter this Unicode character :☑(U+2611) in vim using the command like : ^Vu2611 (which means press ctrl+V then type u2611 in insert mode),Vim somehow breaks it into two characters : &(26) and ^Q(11).

There's no any problem when I tried to insert other kind of characters like □ (U+a1f5).

It seems like Vim stopped its parsing immediately after 26 (which represents character '&') has been read .

So,how can I insert this kind of Unicode characters in Vim (I have tried to paste it into Vim ,it doesn't work)? Please Help!!!

Answer 1

In order to process Unicode characters, Vim must use an 'encoding' that is able to represent those characters. With a value of latin1, the mentioned character cannot be encoded (this 8-bit encoding only includes ASCII and several Western European characters, see here).

So, you need to

:set encoding=utf-8

With that, any newly created file will use that encoding, and you should be able to insert Unicode characters and write them (also with another Unicode file encoding, like :w ++enc=ucs-2le; but if you tried to persist as :w ++enc=latin1, you'd get a CONVERSION ERROR).