Set encoding and fileencoding to utf-8 in Vim

Question

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

User · Answer

You can set the variable  fileencodings  in your  vimrc       This is a list of character encodings considered when starting to edit       an existing file   When a file is read  Vim tries to use the first       mentioned character encoding   If an error is detected  the next one       in the list is tried   When an encoding is found that works         fileencoding  is set to it   If all fail   fileencoding  is set to       an empty string  which means the value of  encoding  is used    See  help filencodings  If you often work with e g  cp1252  you can add it there   set fileencodings ucs-bom utf-8 cp1252 default latin9

User · Answer

TL DR     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   More details  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

User · Answer

set encoding utf-8    The encoding displayed  set fileencoding utf-8    The encoding written to file    You may as well set both in your    vimrc if you always want to work with utf-8

[vim] Set encoding and fileencoding to utf-8 in Vim

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