Getting unicode characters in gVim on Windows

Question

What I'm trying to do? I'm using gVim on Windows, and am trying to get something that looks like this.

See the indent lines and tab characters? (check out the link for the big picture if this one is too small)

I tried a lot of things already, some of them having to do with fonts, some of them having to do with encodings, some of them having to do (it seems) with the current air pressure, and wind speed. But none of them worked.

Answer 1

I don't know if I'm not 100% clear, but if you're talking about seeing hidden characters and :set list doesn't cut it for you there's an entry on SO to tweak it further: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1675688/make-vim-show-all-white-spaces-as-a-character

EDIT: OK, try this one out, then:

:set listchars=eol:$,tab:\|-,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<

And then type :set list and see if it matches what you're looking for.

EDIT: Hmmm - I dug a little more and found this info http://www.mail-archive.com/vim@vim.org/msg09289.html

vim is currently unable to display glyphs for Unicode supplementary chars (they appear as question marks)

The post is several years old, and I'm running GVim under Windows 7, but I get the question mark whenever I try to put in supplementary characters.

Now I am eager for a vim ninja to come along and show me the way, also :-)

EDIT: Last stab, and then that's enough time down this rabbit hole.

:set listchars=eol:$,tab:\|\¬,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<

To get the funny glyph after the escaped pipe character (under Windows) type CTRL+Q then CAPITAL U then 00AC and then hit enter (props to Rook for the link). It's not EXACTLY what you wanted, but it is a character you won't normally type and it will display in a contrasting color under Windows.