Mfcttrf

I recently came over some use for letters like æ, ø, and å. For context, these are available on my keyboard, and work fine in other programs. It's also a Norwegian keyboard if that's relevant.

With Vim, specifically gVim, only æ and ø work. Other combined letters (such as ö and â work out of the box (by typing ¨o). Attempting to write å results in various behavior I can't understand (with no remapping, pressing it shifts around lines or letters. Typing it in an empty buffer with no remapping pulls code from somewhere, possibly a swap file?).

I know I can type the letter with <C-v> (as suggested here) or with <C-k> å å, but this is slow and, in my opinion, unnecessary. Also, <C-v> å results in å, so I'm assuming I'm supposed to use it when attempting to remap.

I tried with imap å <C-v> å, imap å <C-k>å, imap å <C-k> å, imap å <C-k> å å, imap å <C-k> åå, and the basic imap å å, but none of them give me the letter. Remapping it to other output letters doesn't do anything at all (one of the other variants listed here resulted in an e).

How do I remap the key å to actually give me the letter å in insert mode?

When I haven't messed around with mapping, :verbose map å says the key isn't used.

I screwed up slightly on which :verbose map to use. Since it's while editing, and the relevant mapping is imap or inoremap, :verbose imap/:verbose map! would be the right command.

In this case, the reason I had such weird behavior is because of the function it's mapped to. It calls a function in a parentheses auto-completion/utility library, and specifically the fast wrap feature (which wraps words in parentheses - I haven't used that feature much).

Running :verbose imap å or :verbose map! å gave me this:

i å *@<C-R>=AutoPairsFastWrap()<CR>
 Last set from ~.vimpluggedauto-pairspluginauto-pairs.vim line 562

In this case, the plugin used is jiangmiao/auto-pairs. The block that set the shortcut looks like this:

if g:AutoPairsShortcutFastWrap != ''
 execute 'inoremap <buffer> <silent> '.g:AutoPairsShortcutFastWrap.' <C-R>=AutoPairsFastWrap()<CR>'
end

By default, the shortcut is set to <M-e>, but that in itself doesn't necessarily make sense, especially with the mapping. If, however, you type <M-e> when it's not remapped, it outputs å. <C-v> <M-e> also gives å _{this might be keyboard-dependent - I'm not sure and I can't test it}. So the library remapping <M-e> resulted in å being remapped to a function that when provided sensible input works fine, but when provided none or invalid input results in the weird behavior I saw.

The reason I couldn't override it is because the original remapping was done with <buffer>, which seems to override the global ones. I think that's the reason imap å å didn't work. With imap <buffer> å å, it outputs å instead of calling the plugin functon that originally defined it.

That being said, there's a relatively easy fix to this that doesn't require any remapping of å, but rather remapping the library. The code I showed earlier uses g:AutoPairsShortcutFastWrap, which defines which key it'll map to. I just decided on <C-f>, but any unused shortcut will do:

let g:AutoPairsShortcutFastWrap = "<C-f>"

After reloading Vim, å works as a normal letter again.

TL;DR: <M-e> is å (<C-v> <M-e> gives me å at least), jiangmiao/auto-pairs remapped <M-e>, which affected the key. There is most likely other mappings that are equivalent to other non-English letters as well, which can explain what happens when similar keys break on other keyboards.