Useful (Neo)Vim Digraphs

What are digraphs?

Digraphs are used to enter characters that normally cannot be entered by an ordinary keyboard.

neovim docs

Basically, a bunch of useful symbols (or characters) that aren’t usually present on keyboards.

Like this nice cross/close: ×

Or this arrow: →

Or a snowflake: ※

Or some greek symbols: α β ε ζ

You get the idea.

Normally, when I need one (like say I wanted to add an arrow button to the “next”/“prev” buttons in the footer below), I’d just do

:digraph

to open up the list of builtin symbols and pick one that suits. This however, given the darkmode theme on my terminal and grayscale display of the symbols, is murder on my eyes. So, here’s a list of (potentially useful) digraphs nicely diplayed for future use:

How do I use these digraphs?

Oh, basically in insert mode, just go <C-k> which is Ctrl + k btw and enter the characters like :X (note the capital) for snowflake. Easy peasy.

Some symbols may look weird on your browser; try in the editor.

If you’d like to use the hex representation just do (in insert mode) Ctrl + V, then enter u, finally followed by the hex code for the digraph.

Here’s a stackexchange link for entering different base inputs in vim: how-to-enter-non-ascii-characters

Bonus Content!

One usecase for digraphs is to use them as conceal characters. Say you have some go code like so:

func main() {
  doX()
  go doY()
  doZtoo()
}

func doX()
func doY()
func doZtoo()

you can use the ϝ symbol to substitue for the repeated func keyword using following:

syntax match goFunction 'func' conceal cchar=ϝ | set conceallevel=2

to turn the code into:

ϝ main() {
  doX()
  go doY()
  doZtoo()
}

ϝ doX()
ϝ doY()
ϝ doZtoo()

This one’s a freebie - don’t forget to experiment. Perhaps λ in python?

Don’t forget the builtin help: :h digraph or :h conceal

Have fun, cheers!