What is the difference between these two commands?
set encoding=utf-8
set fileencoding=utf-8
Do I need to set both when I want to use utf-8?
Also, do I need to set fileencoding with set
or setglobal
?
In the first case with
set encoding=utf-8
, you'll change the output encoding that is shown in the terminal.In the second case with
set fileencoding=utf-8
, you'll change the output encoding of the file that is written.
As stated by @Dennis, you can set them both in your ~/.vimrc if you always want to work in utf-8
.
From the wiki of VIM about working with unicode
"encoding
sets how vim shall represent characters internally. Utf-8 is necessary for most flavors of Unicode."
"fileencoding
sets the encoding for a particular file (local to buffer); :setglobal sets the default value. An empty value can also be used: it defaults to same as 'encoding'. Or you may want to set one of the ucs encodings, It might make the same disk file bigger or smaller depending on your particular mix of characters. Also, IIUC, utf-8 is always big-endian (high bit first) while ucs can be big-endian or little-endian, so if you use it, you will probably need to set 'bomb" (see below)."