How to start using vim with a non-english keyboard

Question

I recently started using git, and by default it would want to use vim. I always wanted to look a bit deeper in this editor, but was always thrown back, only using it if for some reason (such as in case of a near dead Linux system) it was unavoidable. Even now I soon ended up reconfiguring git to use mcedit instead (which I use for programming).

The problem was that OK, I gave the command :help to see how I could start. Then in the help system it suggests me to jump to the subject interesting me using CTRL-]. And here I am lost. I have a Hungarian keyboard, and simply couldn't find where it excepted to find ]. So I can just scroll around in a list of topics I can not enter.

This is just the beginning: In general how much such "weird" combinations I may except? And how I could fix those up? An other problem with the Hungarian language is that it has a bunch of extra vowels which have to be mapped on the same amount of keys like English with it's 26 letters (there are 9 extra letters, so 9 keys "lost"!). Would this hinder the use of vim for writing Hungarian text (where I would require these keys to produce the language-specific vowels)?

How this problem could be solved in a way that if I happen to get an English keyboard (for which layout I guess vim was originally designed), I wouldn't have to re-learn the positioning of the keys? (Since I have no English keyboard around I can't try what happens. As I tried neither of the two keys on the left of 'P' would suffice for the CTRL-] combination while as far as the layouts I checked the second should be it. Of course my system is configured for Hungarian layout)

The language truly is irrelevant, I guess everyone having non-English keyboards might face similar problems. So how you work yourself around these?

Answer 1

Look at /usr/share/vim/vim74/keymap/ directory (in debian/ubuntu it is a part of the vim-runtime package), you should see a bunch of keymap files for different locales. Chose the one you like. In the example I use russian-jcukenwin.vim.

Add to your .vimrc file →

set keymap=russian-jcukenwin
set iminsert=0
set imsearch=0
highlight lCursor guifg=NONE guibg=Cyan

Now you can switch layout with Ctrl-^ keys. Note: layout is switchable when in insert-mode.

As you can guess the first line is the name of the file I mentioned. The next two lines sets the iminsert and imsearch in order to start writing the very first time with latin layout. In fact Ctrl-^ toggles them between 1 and 0. And the last line draws the caret with cyan color when layout is changed.