Nerdtree: Missing first character in tree structure

[fouladi]

Environment

• Operating System: Ubuntu 14.04 TLS
• Vim version :version: 7.4
• NERDTree version git rev-parse --short HEAD: f406af3
• NERDTree settings applied in your vimrc, if any:
  vim

Process

1. Start Vim

2. Open NERDTree

Current Result

In directory tree I miss first character of all files and directories names.

Expected Result

I miss the full name of files and directories.

Screenshot(s)

Possible Fix

[PhilRunninger]

Try setting this variable, and see what happens. A recent pull request changed the way directory names and filenames are kept separate from the rest of the text on the line in NERDTree. Changing the delimiter from a non-breaking space (\u00a0) to a tab might be all that's needed.

let NERDTreeNodeDelimiter = "\t"

[fouladi]

Thank you, setting the variable NERDTreeNodeDelimiter to a tab fixed the problem.

[stevecj]

I don't understand why the non-breaking space is causing this symptom though. I'm using iTerm2 with Character Encoding set to "Unicode (UTF-8)" and my $LANG is set to en_US.UTF-8.

Under what circumstances does the non-breaking space cause a problem, and in what circumstances does it work as intended?

[PhilRunninger]

I will be updating the NERDTree documentation soon, and probably writing a wiki page with more details. I've seen several scenarios where the nbsp isn't working as intended:

1. It's being used in place of the arrows. See #904.
2. It's being "eaten up" by other plugins that reformat an expanded definition of whitespace that includes nbsp. See #913.
3. Non-English languages/encodings may interpret \u00a0 differently. See #911.

With the increasing number of issue related to this change, I may need to choose a different default value for this setting.

[mmaxs]

I have found that (in Vim 7.4) the cause of the issue is in the following syntax command:
https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree/blob/c905a5d7b87051e574c2e72fae57e56c456ba2f4/syntax/nerdtree.vim#L41
If one comment out this line, all file/directory names are displayed OK (but the delimiter character from the NERDTreeNodeDelimiter becomes unconcealed). It is perhaps a bug in Vim syntax highlighting processing which eats out the next character after matching xA0 (u00A0) in a syntax pattern with conceal option.
For example the same issue is observed for xFF character as a NERDTreeNodeDelimiter value.
With uFEFF - zero width no-break space - all works fine, but it is a non-ascii symbol, and there may be problems with non utf-8 setting for Vim's encoding option or for non utf-8 user's locale.

Also, to minimize weird pattern-context effects when composing the string based on the user input value of NERDTreeNodeDelimiter, I would suggest to modify it in the following way:

exec 'syn match NERDTreeNodeDelimiters #\%d' . char2nr(g:NERDTreeNodeDelimiter) . '# conceal containedin=ALL'

[PhilRunninger]

@mmaxs, I merged pull request #926 last night, which includes your suggestion to use char2nr(). I also changed the default delimiter to "\x07", the non-printable character BELL. Let me know how that works for you.

[mmaxs]

Thank you, Phil. It works OK in Vim 7.4 and in just upgraded one to 8.1