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vimdigraphs

^J digraph not found

I ran :registers and noticed a ^J at the end of each line.

""   def^J
"0   abc^J
"1   def^J

Having never seen it before, I did some research and found this page describing digraphs.

Where I expect to find ^J however, I find ^@, and I find the same thing when I run :digraphs.

The description to the right tells me it's a linefeed, which makes sense given that ^J is at the end of the line, but why do both sources map LF to ^@ if ^@ is already assigned to the NULL digraph.

Is this a typo?

Update: LF gets translated to NULL: source

Solution

  • Apparently ^J is the proper representation for a linefeed, while ^@ represents NULL. The documentation issue is probably related to the fact that trying to insert a linefeed literally, by any method, ends up inserting a null character.

    I tested the following in insert mode:

    ^V^J
^V010
^Vx0a
^Vo012
^Vu000a
^KLF

    All of them have the same result of inserting a null character, properly displayed as ^@. This probably induced the documentation error.

    Edit: This limitation of literal insertion is less surprising after learning that Vim uses the linefeed as an internal representation of the null character, as pointed out in yolenoyer's comment.