Is there a possibility to display an ä as an ä in Vim?

Question

Is there a possibility to display characters in a Vim window (that is: on the screen) that are different from the underlying characters in the buffer?

For example, if filetype is set to html, I'd (sometimes) like to see html-entities replaced by their humanly readable character (for example an ä instead of ä). Of course, this would entail that the rest of the line after the entity would have to be "shifted" to the left. If this is possible somehow, I'd appreciate any hint into the right direction.

Answer 1

If you're using 7.3 or newer, then you can make use of the conceal feature to do that. For example:

syntax match Entity "ä" conceal cchar=ä