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My system locale is set to UTF-8:US, this is confirmed by running the locale command. But it is very strange that every time I type the vim FILENAME command (the file does not exist, I'm using this command to create a new file), and I use :wq to save the file, I always get file coded in ASCII. I tried to add the line set fileencodings=utf-8 in the .vimrc file, but nothing changed. How can I solve this ?

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2 Answers2

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When all your chars are < 128 ASCII and UTF-8 are the same. ASCII is a subset of UTF-8 (and also a subset of latin1 and many other encoding formats).

Probably everything is perfect!

The configuration command:

set fileencodings=list of encoding formats to try

is used to define the order of encoding format that vim will try to use when opening a file.

set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,latin1 is a better idea: first try to use any Unicode with a BOM header, then it will try to interpret it as UTF-8, and if everything fails latin1.

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    I think this is correct, as I just created two files with vim, one containing a single a and one containing a random UTF-8 character; file 1 outputs 1: ASCII text, file 2 outputs 2: UTF-8 Unicode text. So it looks like the encoding is set based on the smallest character set containing the set of characters actually used. – kos Nov 02 '15 at 16:17
  • @kos, thank for the experiment. It makes sense. –  Nov 02 '15 at 16:33
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In your .vimrc, add

set encoding=utf-8

and restart Vim. See Documentation.

Bruni
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