Change menu/ui language of vim to english

Question

I search on google and I read several answers but I am unable to change the menu/ui language of vim to english.

Im my .vimrc I have

set langmenu=en_US.UTF-8
language messages en_US.UTF-8

but it doesn't work, vim uses the default language of my system.

I tried

set langmenu=none

but it's the same.

locale en_US.UTF-8 is installed.

I am using vim 7.4 on ubuntu.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

My native language is Chinese and I use Windows 7. I tried to do this like you did before, finally I tried to writing the following in _vimrc file and it worked for me.

set langmenu=en_US
let $LANG = 'en_US'
source $VIMRUNTIME/delmenu.vim
source $VIMRUNTIME/menu.vim

Answer 2

In case of Gvim it is quite simple to change the language of the gui part of gvim

Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vim74\lang
and remove all folders... and restart gvim then it will open in English...

Answer 3

It works for me to simply add one line

language en_US.utf8

at the top of .vimrc.

Since en_US.utf8 is the output of you $ locale -a command, you should use

language en_US.utf8

instead of

language en_US.UTF-8

Answer 4

I've used different settings:

language messages English_United States
set langmenu=en_US.UTF-8  

This worked for me. I added this at the top of _vimrc.

I have Windows 10 in Korean, and gVim 8.0.586

Answer 5

From :help :language:

Some systems accept aliases like "en" or
"en_US", but some only accept the full specification
like "en_US.ISO_8859-1".  On Unix systems you can use
this command to see what locales are supported:
    :!locale -a

On my Ubuntu machine, I get

$ locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
en_US.utf8
POSIX

So maybe the problem is "utf8" vs. "UTF-8".

From :help 'langmenu':

This option must be set before loading menus, switching on filetype
detection or syntax highlighting.  Once the menus are defined setting
this option has no effect.  But you could do this:
    :source $VIMRUNTIME/delmenu.vim
    :set langmenu=de_DE.ISO_8859-1
    :source $VIMRUNTIME/menu.vim

From the comments, you tried putting it at the top of your vimrc. Perhaps there is a system vimrc file that gets in the way. Check with :version or :scriptnames. If so, then add something like the suggested lines.

Answer 6

Did you put your language settings at the beginning of the vimrc? I have encountered once when I put the lang English after some default settings like

source $VIMRUNTIME/vimrc_example.vim
source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim

The display of gVim will still be Chinese.

Answer 7

On windows it was sufficient for me to just add an environment variable LANG with value en_US.utf8
You can do this with

setx LANG en_US.utf8

or setx /M LANG en_US.utf8 if you want it system wide