Bug#236393: acknowledged by developer (Re: vim doesn't display high unicode characters)

[Marc Lehmann]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 02:48:16PM -0700, Debian Bug Tracking System <owner@bugs.debian.org> wrote:
> Marc Lehmann <debian-reportbug@plan9.de> wrote
> > vim apperently doesn't display high unicode characters (i.e. characters
> > > 65535). while it internally handles them correctly, it always outputs
> > a coloured "?" (i.e. the same as when displaying a character not in the
> > terminals encoding).
> 
> This is not a bug, but the documenter behaviour of vim. Quoting from
> 'help unicode':

Hmm... that section is very confusing, and seems to apply to the GUI
version only ("gvim", as vim doesn't display characters nor does it use
any fonts when run in a terminal, which is where I use it. That comment
only makes sense for the GUI version as it refers to font handling).

There are other comments, such as how combining characters are being drawn
or how double-wide characters interfact with the guifont setting, which
obviously only applies to the GUI version, either.

I don't think the limit to the subset of unicode characters displayed is
really intended, and is most probably an oversight (or maybe a bug :).

At least you should reopen this bug as a wishlist item. I can also submit
this as a wishlist item instead.

> I'm thus closing the bug (and #261164, submitted by you as well, merged
> with #236393).

Ooops, I am sorry.. my only excuse is that there probably was some time in
between the submits and I actually forgot about the issue until I stumbled
over it again and didn't find it in the alraedy-submitted buglist.

I agree with you that documentation doesn't automatically lend itself to
classifying this a sa bug, but as the paragraph only makes sense with
respect to gvim, and not with vim, I sitll think that I do have a point.

In any case, it is at least a wishlist item, as UTF-8 fully supports
non-BMP characters and there is nor reason to artificially limit output
characters to some subset of that supported by the terminal.

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