What is that chäräcter ？

If you are in vim and you encounter a weird looking unicode character, and you want to know what the codepoint(s) for that character is/are you can use ga

If my cursor is over ä and I use ga I get output:

<ä> 228, Hex 00e4, Octal 344

If my cursor is over ä and I use ga I get output:

<a>  97,  Hex 61,  Octal 141 < ̈> 776, Hex 0308, Octal 1410

The first character is a precombined Unicode character, the a with the umlaut already has its own unicode character.

The second character is an a combined with a diacrital mark, and the output of ga reflects that by listing each utf codepoint that composes the character.