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

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.