Subject: Re: openbsd and utf-8 - msg#00376

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 09:13:08AM +0100, franciszek holop wrote:
> i am in the need of writing in utf-8.
> looking at the archives, i see only gtk2edit mentioned.
> but not in the ports (anybody has $17?)

VIM is your friend. If you are not familiar with vi you can use gvim so
that graphical interface can help you for the beginning.

> so what do you people use to write in utf-8 and
> how do you manage? what ports do i need?

I personally use the following combination:

$ xterm -en UTF-8 &
$ vim # in the newly started xterm

To tell the whole truth, my .Xdefaults contains this line:

XTerm*locale: UTF-8

so that I don't need to type -en UTF-8 all the time.
Notice that on the systems with locale support (e.g. Linux)
you should not use this line in .Xdefaults,
but set LANG environment variable instead.

With gvim you could start it as:

$ env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 gvim

Having this line in your .vimrc doesn't hurt either:

set encoding=utf-8

I also use mutt for e-mail. Having this in my .mutt/muttrc helps:

set charset=utf-8
set editor=vim

That let's it know that the mail it reads is in UTF-8, and to use
vim instead of /usr/bin/vi.

For writing, the send_charset in mutt is already set to default to
"us-ascii:iso-8859-1:utf-8" which is exactly the order I want it in.

a) if there are only ASCII characters send it in us-ascii
b) if there are characters in the range 128-255 send it
iso-8859-1
c) if there are other characters, send it utf-8

Finally, I have aliased

alias more='LANG=en_US.UTF-8 more'

because more is a hard link to less on OpenBSD, which being a GNU
application respects locale. You could use LC_CTYPE instead of LANG in
all examples above.

Best regards,
--
Zvezdan Petkovic <zvezdan@xxxxxxxxx>
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/