I struggled with a similar issue in my vim sessions on a remote Ubuntu 11.10 system for a couple of hours installing things, uninstalling things, tweaking configuration files, playing with terminal settings and generally mucking about. No matter what I tried, my ż and ś and ł characters were showing up as periods.

I eventually found Comment #3 on this UTF-8 encoding post using Google and suddenly realized I am an idiot. I found your post very well written and it was one of my first Google hits so I figured I’d post a comment here to hopefully help the next guy avoid some frustration.

If you run into this kind of issue while trying to edit UTF-8 encoded files through an SSH client, don’t forget to check what character encoding you’re using in the client!! In PuTTY, it’s Window => Translation => Remote Character Set and it defaults to ISO-8859-1.

After enabling polish letters… almost all work, only for
ś (alt-s) is shown
ź (alt-x) is shown

Could you give some solution?

@Sebastian: Trzy rzeczy:

1. Upewnij się że masz nastawiony prawidłowy keyboard layout – musi być Poilish Programmer’s

2. Zmień skrypt na ten:

if has("multi_byte")
  if &termencoding == ""
    let &termencoding = &encoding
  endif
  set encoding=utf-8
  setglobal fileencoding=utf-8 bomb
  set fileencodings=ucs-bom,utf-8,latin1
endif

3. Naciskaj prawym Alt’em nie lewym. Polskie znaczki są aktywowane przez tkzw Alt-Gr – czyli prawy Alt w Polish Programmers’

Powinno działać. Przynajmniej działa u mnie.

Probowalem uzyc twego tutoriala ale nie działa.
Uruchamiam VIMA spod konsoli w XP SP2. mam czcionke consolas a mimo to
alt-o, alt-a,alt-s,alt-z zamiast dawać poprawną lliterkę dają mi znaczek “a”.
jesli uruchomie gvim wszystko wydaje sie ok, wiec zgaduje ze to jakis problem z kodowaniem w dosie.

How did you get the polish letters to work on ubuntu so easily I’m having no luck!

You actually can use your regular keyboard layout and insert text in another language! It’s achieved with vim keymaps.

Yeah, I can’t even imagine how parts of the world which don’t use the Latin alphabet deal with this crap on daily basis. And I believe that Cyrylic is not even the worst case here – I assume that more unicode related issues arise when you start working in alphabets that are written right-to-left (arabic) or Japanese with the diverse kanji, hiragana and katakana alphabets.

And you are correct – I never had this issue on linux.

You’re lucky the Polish alphabet is a latin one. It’s a PITA to use vim when writing in cyrillic. You’re hardly more efficient in vim than in, say, Leafpad, because you have to switch the keyboard layout when you switch between insert an normal mode. Luckily, most of the time, I need to write documents in English.

The Unicode problem was particular to how vim behaves in Windows, I presume?

Oh, gżegżółka == cuckoo bird. Or rather the common name for it. The official name for the bird (one that you find in the encyclopedia) and the more popular one is kukułka. Gżegżółka is an older name, and nowadays mostly functions as an orthographic curiosity – something that is bound to come up on spelling bees and tests.

Also, it is a tongue breaker which is fun to teach to foreigners. Most Polish people can pronounce the word without problems. English speakers usually have major problems even trying to repeat it. :)

Don’t leave us hanging…what does Gżegżółka mean (Google’s Polish -> English translator doesn’t help)?