How to edit UTF-8 files with vim

How can I edit UTF-8 files with vim?

There is a problem with german special characters like 'Ä', 'ü'. There are some in the comments. vim shows Ã~D instead of 'Ä' and ü instead of 'ü' then. (I hope there is no encoding problem on your browser :)

I have no "~/.vimrc" file.

In the "~/.viminfo" is

...
# Value of 'encoding' when this file was written
*encoding=latin1
...

If I enter locale, it gives LANG=C.UTF-8. It was LANG=C but I changed with export LANG=C.UTF-8. But nothing changed.

I'm using MobaXterm 11.0 to get access from a Win10 computer. Maybe there is the problem?

(Linux v. "Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS")

Update:

• MobaXterm was already (and still is) set to UTF-8
• I have changed with [CTRL] + right mouse key (then there is a menu) the shell to UTF-8.
• In addition I set export LC_TYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 ("de_DE"!)

Now it works a bit better :-|

• more and cat works
• less and vi not

With set enc:utf8 in vi, it works there. (So vi is a little part of the solution)

And about less I should maybe read the manpages...?

If the encoding of the file is messed up you can let Vim now by entering these commands:

: set enc=utf8
: set fenc=utf8

The first command controls how the content is displayed, the second how it is written to disk.

However, the problem with wrong encoding could also be in a SSH-client like putty for instance, if you try to edit over SSH. If so have a look at Putty setting to get right encoding.