Vim Error: E474: Invalid argument: listchars=tab:»·,trail:·
None of the other solutions worked for me.
My listchars
looks like this:
listchars=eol:~,tab:>.,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<,space:_
The problem was that my Vim is too old for the space:
parameter in listchars
. As we can read in this post (I modified the quote to make it more readable):
space:
was added tolistchars
inv7.4.710
on 2015-04-21 by Bram. The stock Debian install of Vim doesn't offerspace:
.
The removal of the trailing ,space:_
solves the problem.
But wait! I want my vimrc to be portable
Well, as 816-8055 suggests you might use if has()
in your vimrc:
if has("patch-7.4.710")
listchars=eol:~,tab:>.,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<,space:_
else
listchars=eol:~,tab:>.,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<
endif
Solution:
Place the following lines at the top of the .vimrc the error mentions:
.vimrc:
scriptencoding utf-8
set encoding=utf-8
Not a real solution to your specific problem, but another (non-utf8-safe) way might be just to use ASCII chars, like this:
set listchars=tab:>-,trail:.,precedes:<,extends:>
If you have UTF-8 available, Justins solution is the better one of course.
Just placing set encoding=utf8
anywhere in my _vimrc, but before set lcs=tab:>-,trail:·,nbsp:·,extends:>,precedes:<
solved it