I just created a vim plugin "vim-troll-stopper" https://github.com/vim-utils/vim-troll-stopper

It protects you from these tricks by highlighting "troll" unicode characters in red.

How about,

  :syn match Error "[^ -~]"

That seems useful. Can you share it?

Here you go:

    :set statusline=%F%m%r%h%w\ [TYPE=%Y]\ [ASCII=\%03.3b]\ [HEX=\%02.2B]\ [POS=%04l,%04v][%p%%]\ [LEN=%L]
    :set laststatus=2

Produces a status line when inserting and recording a macro like (the character under the cursor is 'm':

    ~/.vimrc [TYPE=VIM] [ASCII=109] [HEX=6D] [POS=0123,0020][67%] [LEN=182]
    -- INSERT --recording

And, of course... `:help statusline`

This doesn't seem Unicode-aware at all. I put my cursor on the character 每 and it says:

  [ASCII=2>4] [HEX=0>4]

It's not ASCII, and its hex code is 6BCF.

It also says "ASCII=252" when I put the cursor over "ü". Claiming that values over 127 are ASCII is just a malapropism.

vi can be so elegant.

For us emacsen you can do a (what-cursor-position &optional DETAIL) which is usually bound to Ctl-x =

I don't think it will be nearly this clean to add it to the modeline, but I'll take a look.

Very nice! Thanks.

Cool! How do you do that?

I'd like to know, too. Until then, you can type "ga" in normal mode to get a display of the decimal, hex, and octal value of the character under the cursor.

vim-characterize has a nice enhancement of "ga", adding Unicode info, digraphs, emojis, and HTML entities. https://github.com/tpope/vim-characterize

Replied with it in a sibling comment.