sungo vs unicode
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 LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"; export
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"; (That last var is important for
applications like mutt.)
- export TERM=rxvt-unicode (Better, launch urxvt as
urxvt -tn rxvt-unicode.)
- In ~/.screenrc, add defutf8 on. Alternately,
launch screen as screen -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. :)