The purpose of this post is to expand on the following sentence [1]:

Russian letters are created by entering [Ctrl-k followed by] a corresponding Latin letter followed by an equals sign -, or, in a few places, a percent sign %.

The Russian alphabet has 33 letters, so there couldn’t be a Latin letter for every Russian letter. Also, there are Latin letters that don’t have a Russian counterpart and vice versa. So the mapping can’t be simple. But still, the above summary is nice: try control-k followed by the English analog and the equal sign. If that doesn’t work, try a percent sign instead.

Which Latin letters does Vim chose as corresponding to Russian letters? Does it go by sound or appearance? For example, the Russian letter Н looks like a Latin H but it sounds like a Latin N. Vim goes by sound. You would enter the Russian letter Н by typing Ctrl-k N =.

For full details, see the Vim documentation :h digraph-table. I give a simplified excerpt from the documentation below. I just look at capital letters because the lower case letters are analogous. All the official Unicode names begin with CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER and so I cut that part out.

char    digraph hex     official name 
А       A=      0410    A
Б       B=      0411    BE
В       V=      0412    VE
Г       G=      0413    GHE
Д       D=      0414    DE
Е       E=      0415    IE
Ё       IO      0401    IO
Ж       Z%      0416    ZHE
З       Z=      0417    ZE
И       I=      0418    I
Й       J=      0419    SHORT I
К       K=      041A    KA
Л       L=      041B    EL
М       M=      041C    EM
Н       N=      041D    EN
О       O=      041E    O
П       P=      041F    PE
Р       R=      0420    ER
С       S=      0421    ES
Т       T=      0422    TE
У       U=      0423    U
Ф       F=      0424    EF
Х       H=      0425    HA
Ц       C=      0426    TSE
Ч       C%      0427    CHE
Ш       S%      0428    SHA
Щ       Sc      0429    SHCHA
Ъ       ="      042A    HARD SIGN
Ы       Y=      042B    YERU
Ь       %"      042C    SOFT SIGN
Э       JE      042D    E
Ю       JU      042E    YU
Я       JA      042F    YA

Note that the end of the alphabet is more complicated than simply using a Latin letter and either an equal or percent sign. Also, the table is in alphabetical order, which doesn’t quite correspond to Unicode numerical order because of a quirk with the letter Ё (U+0401) explained here.

[1] Arnold Robbins and Elbert Hannah. Learning the vi & Vim Editors, 8th edition

The post Entering Russian characters in Vim with digraphs first appeared on John D. Cook.