Re: enable multi-byte?

[A.J.Mechelynck]

Robert Hicks wrote:
Yakov Lerner wrote:
On 9/26/06, Robert Hicks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I did a standard install of Vim7 on HP/UX and multi-byte was not
enabled. I looked at my Windows version and multi-byte is enabled.
What would determine for me if I need to enable it?

in :version, see whether you have +multi_byte or -multi_bytes.

Yakov


On the HP it is a "-". The question for me is do I want it or need it 
enough to recompile Vim for it?

Robert



If you only ever edit 8-bit files (e.g., files in alphabetic scripts encoded 
in ISO-8859-something), you usually don't need +multi_byte (but see below). 
Having it doesn't hurt though.

You need +multi_byte for Unicode (which is the only way to mix several writing 
systems, such as Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, ...) in a 
single file. Unicode files are also more and more used for system "text" files 
on some OSes. You also need +multi_byte for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, 
which have too many characters for the 256 spots of 8-bit encodings, and in 
general for any 16-bit encodings, see ":help encoding-values". Finally, it's 
better to set 'encoding' to UTF-8 (which requires +multi_byte) if you want to 
be able to display files using different character sets in split-windows in a 
single instance of Vim.

If you use Vim to read mail, then IMHO you'd better have a Unicode-enabled 
version, because you never know what charset the other party is going to be 
using. Even on the Vim mailing lists, East-Asian users may include in their 
English-language mails the word "wrote" before a quote, or examples of Vim 
misbehaviour on East-Asian locales, written in Chinese characters.

Compiling Vim on a Unix-like system is much easier than on Windows. See my 
HowTo page http://users.skynet.be/antoine.mechelynck/vim/compunix.htm

Anyway, sooner or later you will want to compile Vim to include the bugfixes. 
There are currently 110 bugfixes out (but IIUC no.110 is only for the Amiga). 
See the full list (one line per patch) at 
http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/7.0/README

If the second line of the output of ":version" doesn't say "Included patches:" 
then you've got an unpatched Vim; otherwise you can see there exactly which 
bugfixes are present in the version you're using.


Best regards,
Tony.