/vim-unicode-homoglyphs

Highlight and normalize unicode homoglyphs in Vim.

Primary LanguageVim Script

Every once in a while one pastes some (markup) code or prose from the internet into Vim and is at loss why it does not compile or render as meant to. This plug-in offers a hint and a solution by providing

  • highlighting of Unicode Homoglyphs, characters (among them many white spaces) that only appear like ASCII characters but are not, and
  • the normal mode mapping cu to toggle it,

and

  • an operator mapping gy in normal mode, for example gyip operates on a paragraph,
  • a mapping gyy (and gygy) in normal mode that operates on a single line,
  • a mapping gy that operates on the visual selection, and
  • a command NormalizeHomoglyphs that operates on given range (equal to the whole buffer if unspecified)

that normalize Unicode Homoglyphs.

Usage

For example, hitting gyip on

!ǃ！
"״″＂

turns it into

!!!
""""

Configuration

To disable highlighting of Unicode homoglyphs by default, add to your vimrc the line

    let g:is_homoglyph_on = 0

To change mappings, for example, to use zy instead of gy and zu instead of cu, add the lines

    nmap zy <plug>(NormalizeHomoglyphs)
    xmap zy <plug>(NormalizeHomoglyphs)

    nmap zu <plug>(HighlightHomoglyphs)

to your vimrc.

Related

The vim-troll-stopper plug-in highlights and replaces Unicode homoglyphs commonly used to play pranks on coders. It is similar to this plug-in, but apparently its description made it hard to be found for me; I stumbled upon it way down the road by coincidence.

For more convenient version control of prose, see the Vim plug-in vim-sentence-chopper that puts each sentence onto a single line.