Special characters in VIM

It is possible to enter any character (which can be displayed in your current 'encoding'), even a character for which no digraph is defined, if you know the character value, as follows (where ^V means "hit Ctrl-V, except if you use Ctrl-V to paste, in which case you should hit Ctrl-Q instead):

• By decimal value: ^Vnnn (with 000 <= nnn <= 255)
• By octal value: ^VOnnn or ^Vonnn (with 000 <= nnn <= 377)
• By hex value: ^VXnn or ^Vxnn (with 00 <= nn <= FF)
• By hex value for BMP Unicode codepoints: ^Vunnnn (with 0000 <= nnnn <= FFFF)
• By hex value for any Unicode codepoint: ^VUnnnnnnnn (with 00000000 <= nnnnnnnn <= 7FFFFFFF)

Notes

1. In all cases, initial zeros may be omitted if the next character typed is not a digit in the given base (except, of course, that the value zero must be entered as at least one zero).
2. Hex digits A-F, when used, can be typed in upper or lower case, or even in any mixture of them.