Vim-airline: Problem With Glyphs

[r004]

I installed airline and set my ~/.vimrc accordingly. but I get these Chinese glyph instead.
I use PragmataPro font.

well instead of those nice symbols I have Chinese glyphs. What is exactly wrong with my vim?

[bling]

try set encoding=utf-8

[r004]

Didn't change anything.
Should I put something somewhere else. like a fontconfig file in my home directory. If yes please tell me exactly what?
echo -e "\xE2\x98\xA0" returns ☠ .

[edkolev]

are you using a powerline font? https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline-fonts

[r004]

PragmataPro; and it is my understanding that this font is built with those glyphs from the get go.

[edkolev]

does :echo "\ue0b2" print a powerline arrow?

[r004]

No the Chinese symbol

[edkolev]

OK, so the font is problematic - you can try with a different one. Also you can try changing your terminal settings regarding something like "doube-width characters"

[r004]

What you mean about the font being problematic? (should I patch the font with font patcher?)
explain the option regarding "double-with characters" please!

[edkolev]

For starters, check if you observe the issue with any of these fonts https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline-fonts

[r004]

Well yes that was the font problem. I did a patch ( https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline-fontpatcher) on the PragmataPro.ttf font that I have and now I get this:

Is my patcher script out of date or what?

[edkolev]

I have no way to tell if your patcher is outdated. Check out these docs https://powerline.readthedocs.org/en/latest/fontpatching.html

[r004]

I used exactly that but you could see the result!

[edkolev]

PragmataPro claims to include powerline symbols out-of-the-box http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm#.U7ut96ifJFQ Strange that it's not working...
Maybe you need to get the "complete" version

[r004]

I don't want to pay another 120$ for a set. please let me know, if you or anyone else find a way.

[bling]

unfortunately, there's not much we can do to help here besides recommending that you try again or use a different font.

[kaepora]

This problem can be fixed by adding the following line to your vimrc:

let g:airline_powerline_fonts=1

This solved the issue for me using Essential PragmataPro.

[abelcheung]

(Hope maintainers would forgive me commenting on this closed issue)
I do encounter the exact problem a while ago, with the Chinese characters clobbering the nice symbols one should have, even after installing patched font. While @bling 's suggestion worked, there is one caveat:

set encoding=utf-8

MUST be specified before

let g:airline_powerline_fonts=1.

Order is important in vim config. For reason I haven't investigated, under default encoding used in Windows (which is probably multibyte codepage under original reporter's environment), system fallback multibyte font would be looked up instead of the patched font.

[chrisbra]

Well, in general, setting encoding always has to be the very first item in your .vimrc, because this will possibly invalidate all strings in the Vim core, e.g. registers, variables and similar.