You can reload a file using a different encoding if Vim was not able to detect the correct encoding: :e ++enc=<encoding> When you load a file with box drawing characters in it and those characters render incorrect as A-umlauts (Ã) or other things, here is a list of codepages/encodings you can try: cp850 cp860 cp1252 windows-1252 iso-8859-1 see http://skeena.net/kb/character-sets.html for a much longer list If you've got chinese characters, you've probably got a unicode file in the wrong mode: utf-16be utf-16le Once you've found the right encoding, convert the file to unicode and re-save: :set fenc=utf-8 :w converted_file