Neovim 101 — Digraphs, Icons, and Symbols

Tips and tricks to use digraphs, icons, and symbols.

Neovim 101 — Digraphs, Icons, and Symbols

This article explores built-in Neovim features to enter symbols and icons. We will also try out plugins to help us enter digraphs, icons, and symbols.

This article is part of the Neovim 101 series.

The Neovim configuration files are available in this repository.

Getting Started

Without using any plugins, there are several ways that we can enter symbols or icons in Neovim.

Digraph

Let’s get started with the basics of digraphs.

Digraphs (:h digraph) are used to enter characters that normally cannot be entered by an ordinary keyboard. These are mostly printable non-ASCII characters.

There are 2 methods to enter digraphs (:h digraphs-use).

• CTRL-k {char1} {char2} — Use in insert mode
• {char1} <BS> {char2} — Use in insert mode, and only when the digraph (:h digraph) option is set. The default is off.

For example, to enter the copyright character, we can type Ctr-k Co in insert mode.