I’m finally following p5p again. Yesterday, it uncovered a yak that demanded to be shaved. Someone posted an email with charset utf8 and some dreaded non-ascii characters. How dare they! More importantly, something in the Eterm-ssh-screen-mutt pipeline managed to corrupt the terminal. So, I set out to get at least utf8 support in my commonly used applications.
Firefox already supports unicode so I didn’t have to worry about that. Next, E17 needed to support unicode in the titlebars. Easy peasy. I changed the standard font to Bitstream Vera Sans which supports utf8 and, I suspect, the full unicode set. Then came the difficult part. How to get my full terminal pipeline to handle those funny characters properly….
I’ll save you the gnashing of teeth and give you the step by step:
- Switch to urxvt. (I’ve used Eterm forever but it doesn’t support unicode and probably never will).
- Export some variables:
(That last var is important for applications like mutt.)export LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"; export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8";
(Better, launch urxvt as urxvt -tn rxvt-unicode.)export TERM=rxvt-unicode - In ~/.screenrc, add
defutf8 on. Alternately, launch screen asscreen -U
It’s important that the various environment variables be set everywhere, including the remote servers you’re accessing.
mutt will automatically detect your environment and support the new
charsets. For irssi, you need to run /set term_charset UTF-8.
From here, the only potential problem is the font you’re using. If the font doesn’t support unicode, none of the above matters. The font that I use for my terminals, ‘fixed’, has unicode support. As I mentioned above, the Bitstream family does too. If you’re a fan of the font ‘Anonymous’, grab Anonymous Pro. Lots of other font families support unicode as well.
Hopefully, this will save someone some drama. :)