On 7/5/06, Jürgen Krämer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To work around the problem in this example is not that hard -- I can use /\%...v instead.
Yes
The example in my original mail poses a bigger problem (to me) -- I'd like to switch to "encoding=utf-8" as default, but I often need to work with text files of fixed line length. With encoding set to "latin1" the difference between column number and virtual column number in the status line is a visual clue that there is a tabular or a control code in the line, reminding me to look for this character. With UTF-8 encoding this hint would be rendered useless because of all those little umlauts in German. :-(
There's yet another reason for col()!=virtcol(). It's unprintable characters like ^A ^@ ^[ Granted, they occur rarely in textfiles, but if they do, they'll cause virtcol() != col(). If you stick with virtcol() and \%v, you'll probably not feel any inconvenience. I mean, there are two types of columns (virtual and non-virtual), and if someone confuses the two, and uses %\c instead of %\v or col() instead of virtcol(), or vice versa, it's inconvenient. Once the confusion is fixed, and you use the right type of column index, doesn't it solve the inconvenience ? (except that there are still two types of columns, which requires increased attention as to which one to use in each case) ? Yakov
