Problems with vim/locale as non-root user on Solaris

Question

I do some work on a Solaris 10 machine, and my .vimrc is set up to show unicode characters for tabs and line endings:

set listchars=tab:▸\ ,eol:¬

This works out of the box on my OS X machine. On Linux as well as Solaris I get the following error when I start vim:

Error detected while processing /home/lhanson/.vimrc:
line   17:
E474: Invalid argument: listchars=tab:?~V?\ ,eol:¬

I solved this on my Linux box by setting LANG=en_US.utf8 ('locale -a' shows this as being an option).

On Solaris, however, 'locale -a' shows the following:

C
POSIX
iso_8859_1

Setting LANG to C or POSIX yields the same error, and even though iso_8859_1 probably wouldn't work it doesn't successfully change the locale anyway.

As a non-root user, is there any way I can have my unicode characters show up?

Answer 1

I managed to resolve my issue without touching the locales installed on the machine.

My "set listchars..." line came before another section of my .vimrc where I set up unicode options. Specifically:

if has("multi_byte")
  if &termencoding == ""
    let &termencoding = &encoding
  endif
  set encoding=utf-8
  setglobal fileencoding=utf-8 bomb
  set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,latin1
endif

That example (and more useful info) can be seen here: Working with Unicode.

By removing the section that set termencoding and moving my "set listchars" line below "set encoding=utf-8", I'm now able to see my unicode listchars.