If you write in a language other than English, you will need to enter
characters not necessarily on your keyboard: accented characters and letters
in other scripts. Even if you use English, you might find it occasionally
necessary to enter special characters. Frankly, the easiest way to do this is
by means of your desktop environment (Gnome, KDE on Linux).8 Vim is able to
communicate with the desktop processes and receive whatever characters you
send it. However, Vim has another mechanism of its own for producing special
characters. In Vim they are called ``digraphs,''
two keystroke combinations that lead to the production of a single
character, like 'a for á and DG for the degree symbol (35
C).
When, while editing, you need a special character, press control-k and then the two digit code for that letter. This incomplete table shows some of the digraphs you would use for text with diacritical marks common to European languages. Type :help digraphs for a complete list.
As an example, if you want a c cedilla (ç), the comma key plus one other character is the way to produce it, so as you're typing in insert mode, type control-k then ,c. If you want a tilde n (ñ), type control-k then ?n.
