Vim doesn't support unicode?

Question

I\'m trying to get the following into my .vimrc

\" Use the same symbols as TextMate for tabstops and EOLs
set listchars=tab:▸\\ ,eol:¬

Thos

Answer 1

Do you need a

scriptencoding utf-8

or whatever encoding your .vimrc is actually in?

Answer 2

When all else failed, telling vim to save with UTF-8 encoding seemed to work (for now at least):

:write ++enc=utf-8

Answer 3

You need to compile vim with multi-byte support.

The easiest way to do this is to run

./configure --with-features=big
make

This will build vim with the correct support.

You can verify that it was compiled correctly with

:version

in vim or by running

vim --version

and looking for +multi_byte. If it says -multi_byte it will not work.