vim and unicode - Editors

Dave Feustel <dfeustel@mindspring.com> writes:

> How well does vim work with unicode (utf8)?

Very well.

> Is there any way to use virtual keyboards to facilitate the inclusion
> of multiple languages (eg English, Russian, French) in the same
> document?

I don't know virtual keyboards very well. Hence I can not answer.


--
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen * http colon slash slash iki dot fi slash juhtolv
"ore wo mitsumeteiru anata sama wa ossharu bakari. kesshite dakiyosete wa
kurenai ooki na anata no te. ore no tanjoubi ni wa ai wo kai ataeru. kyou wa
kumori nochi ame." Dir en grey

On 2008-09-13, Dave Feustel <dfeustel@mindspring.com> wrote:
> How well does vim work with unicode (utf8)?
> Is there any way to use virtual keyboards
> to facilitate the inclusion of multiple
> languages (eg English, Russian, French)
> in the same document?

You don't do that with vim but with whatever your host system provides.
On GNU/Linux you use something called "xim" or "skim" which has a lot of
different input methods for all kinds of different languages.

Then you just use it to input characters into vim, and they come up on
the screen provided you've got the fonts. Vim works pretty well with it
all, although it doesn't do right-to-left or bidirectional layout for
things like Arabic, and you would probably need to mess around a bit to
get gq to work properly for Chinese or Japanese or anything that doesn't
just break lines basically at spaces.

Russian and French should be no problem though.

Ben C scripsit:
> On 2008-09-13, Dave Feustel <dfeustel@mindspring.com> wrote:
>> How well does vim work with unicode (utf8)?
>> Is there any way to use virtual keyboards
>> to facilitate the inclusion of multiple
>> languages (eg English, Russian, French)
>> in the same document?
>
> You don't do that with vim but with whatever your host system provides.
> On GNU/Linux you use something called "xim" or "skim" which has a lot of
> different input methods for all kinds of different languages.
>
> Then you just use it to input characters into vim, and they come up on
> the screen provided you've got the fonts. Vim works pretty well with it
> all, although it doesn't do right-to-left or bidirectional layout for
> things like Arabic, and you would probably need to mess around a bit to
> get gq to work properly for Chinese or Japanese or anything that doesn't
> just break lines basically at spaces.

Vim works with right-to-left languages

:help 'rightleft'
:help arabic.txt
:help hebrew.txt

Also if terminal supports bi-directional text Vim can take advantage of
that :help 'termbidi' , however internal gvim terminal doesn't support
that.

m.
--
LaTeX + Vim = http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/
Vim Universal Templates: http://vim.sf.net/script.php?script_id=1078
vim.pl - http://skawina.eu.org/mikolaj
CLEWN - http://clewn.sf.net

On 2008-09-14, Mikolaj Machowski <mikmach@wp.pl> wrote:
> Ben C scripsit:
>> On 2008-09-13, Dave Feustel <dfeustel@mindspring.com> wrote:
>>> How well does vim work with unicode (utf8)?
>>> Is there any way to use virtual keyboards
>>> to facilitate the inclusion of multiple
>>> languages (eg English, Russian, French)
>>> in the same document?
>>
>> You don't do that with vim but with whatever your host system provides.
>> On GNU/Linux you use something called "xim" or "skim" which has a lot of
>> different input methods for all kinds of different languages.
>>
>> Then you just use it to input characters into vim, and they come up on
>> the screen provided you've got the fonts. Vim works pretty well with it
>> all, although it doesn't do right-to-left or bidirectional layout for
>> things like Arabic, and you would probably need to mess around a bit to
>> get gq to work properly for Chinese or Japanese or anything that doesn't
>> just break lines basically at spaces.
>
> Vim works with right-to-left languages
>
>:help 'rightleft'
>:help arabic.txt
>:help hebrew.txt

My mistake! I should have remembered the rule that if you can think of
it, vim probably supports it.

Ben C <spamspam@spam.eggs> wrote:
> On 2008-09-13, Dave Feustel <dfeustel@mindspring.com> wrote:
>> How well does vim work with unicode (utf8)?
>> Is there any way to use virtual keyboards
>> to facilitate the inclusion of multiple
>> languages (eg English, Russian, French)
>> in the same document?
>
> You don't do that with vim but with whatever your host system provides.
> On GNU/Linux you use something called "xim" or "skim" which has a lot of
> different input methods for all kinds of different languages.
>
> Then you just use it to input characters into vim, and they come up on
> the screen provided you've got the fonts. Vim works pretty well with it
> all, although it doesn't do right-to-left or bidirectional layout for
> things like Arabic, and you would probably need to mess around a bit to
> get gq to work properly for Chinese or Japanese or anything that doesn't
> just break lines basically at spaces.
>
> Russian and French should be no problem though.

I did not find these programs on Suse, but I did find gucharmap and
yudit. Gucharmap is a visual unicode character displayer and
yudit is a multi-language unicode editor.

Hi Dave,

Dave Feustel wrote:
> How well does vim work with unicode (utf8)? Is there any way to
> use virtual keyboards to facilitate the inclusion of multiple
> languages (eg English, Russian, French) in the same document?
>
> Thanks.

vim has i pretty good support of different keyboards.

My default keyboard is german, for Ancient Greek support I add to
my .vimrc:

set keymap+=greek_utf-8
set imi=0 ims=0 "start with a additional keymap
set but inactive

You can find a supported keympas and their names in the
/usr/share/vim/vim72/keympas folder.

Now vim will start with you default keymappings, in my case utf8
german. If you press <C-^> in insert (!) mode, vim will switch to
the ancient greek keyboard. You can edit these keymaps to your
liking, the ancient greek keyboard defaults to the Latex-Mappings.

I would recommand to you a standard english utf8-keymap as default
with Russian as options. The few missing French characters you can
easily insert via diagraphs. For example you will get "é" or "ç" if
your press in insert mode <C-k>e' or <C-k>c, respectively.

Kind regards

Chris