What could cause strange characters in Vim?

Question

I'm have this really strange problem in Vim using the NERD tree plugin, where, as you can see in the picture, the characters are showing up very strange. Where there is the ahat, ~V 3/4 it should be |-. I've set my LANG to en_US and LC_ALL to en_US (in Arch linux), and am using the Anonymous Pro font, although switching the font makes no difference.

Answer 1

I've solved the problem. What I did to solve it:

• Edited /etc/locale.gen to LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8" instead of LC_ALL="en_US"
• Ran locale-gen as root
• Ran locale -a, it showed en_US.UTF-8; however, locale showed LC_ALL still being en_US, then I remembered I had exported LC_ALL in my .bashrc last night trying to fix this, so I changed my LANG and LC_ALL to en_US.UTF-8
• Reloaded the terminal, ran gvim, success! It's strange though, it is using the triangle arrow characters now, instead of the box ones. Makes me think it uses the box ones for ISO-8859 and triangles for UTF-8 possibly, which leads me to suspect I might have problems down the road in some other program. I'll fix it when it comes to it.

Answer 2

This one liner from scrooloose on this thread fixed it:

let g:NERDTreeDirArrows=0

Try putting that in your .vimrc

(see also: same answer posted here on Stack Overflow)

Answer 3

Maybe this is not worth a hack but it seems it worked for me.

I changed the line in NERDTree.vim:

call s:initVariable("g:NERDTreeDirArrows", s:running_windows) 

(it was !s:running_windows before)

Now I don't see any fancy + symbol, but at least jumping directories works from within vim. I'm on solaris and I don't think I have root access.

Answer 4

My change was to remove boolean negation (character !). Here is a git diff:

~/.vim/plugged/nerdtree/plugin]$ git diff NERD_tree.vim
diff --git a/plugin/NERD_tree.vim b/plugin/NERD_tree.vim
index bbcc55f..6342b6c 100644
--- a/plugin/NERD_tree.vim
+++ b/plugin/NERD_tree.vim
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ call s:initVariable("g:NERDTreeShowHidden", 0)
 call s:initVariable("g:NERDTreeShowLineNumbers", 0)
 call s:initVariable("g:NERDTreeSortDirs", 1)

-if !nerdtree#runningWindows()
+if nerdtree#runningWindows()
     call s:initVariable("g:NERDTreeDirArrowExpandable", "--junk1-here--")
     call s:initVariable("g:NERDTreeDirArrowCollapsible", "--junk2-here--")
 else

Answer 5

Adding values explicitly, to the next 2 variables in .vimrc (vim config) solved the problem for me:

let g:NERDTreeDirArrowExpandable = '▸'
let g:NERDTreeDirArrowCollapsible = '▾'

These should be default values but for some reason they were not set for me on ubuntu/vim.

Answer 6

If your vimrc is changing guicursor, try removing that line. Other variables which seem to cause/prevent these are:

set guicursor= in vimrc
set t_Co= in vimrc
export TERM=xterm-256color in shell

Answer 7

In my case issue was related to locale issue. Solution:

1. Set value:

   export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

2. Run vim:

   vim

See details for locale issue here:

Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory