Here is a simple alias for the Bash shell to display what Vim thinks is a file's encoding: alias vimenc='vim -c '\''let $enc = &fileencoding | execute "!echo Encoding: $enc" | q'\''' This saves having to open Vim, then open the file and check the file encoding, and exit. The alias requires a file as a parameter. Usage examples: $ vimenc UTF-16.xml Encoding: utf-16le Press ENTER or type command to continue $ vimenc ISO-8859-1.xml Encoding: latin1 Press ENTER or type command to continue