What do these signs mean in Vim?

Question

I've a hard time understanding signs I see in my text editor Vim. I see signs like ^@ and ^A and ^M and ^F. What does this mean? Is there any structured list of these signs and their meaning?

Trying to google it is a dead end since Google will not search for "^@".

Answer 1

Those signs are control characters. ^@ is a NUL or the 0 character, ^M is CR or character 13, etc. What this notation is in effect saying is that you're looking at just the lower 5 bits of an @, M or whatever.

An ASCII chart, e.g. this will help you sort most of them out. Find the character you're seeing in vim somewhere in the chart, and then its code is in the leftmost column.