Switching iTerm To UTF-8
Oct 30 2009, 18:12 permalinkThis is just a short note on how I (finally) migrated to UTF-8 in my terminal (iTerm 0.10) on MacOS X 10.4.
It was really very simple. First of all, here is how the locale/language variables are set up in my .profile:
export LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
if [ "$ENCODING" = "koi8r" ]; then
export LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R
fi
export LC_ALL=$LANG
The koi8r is still there just in case. I have a "bookmark" in iTerm (Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks), which calls login like this:
env ENCODING=koi8r login -fp vss
This way I don't need to mess around if I ever need to switch back to koi8-r encoding temporarily.
I had to spend a few minutes to figure out why Vim 7.2 doesn't work with UTF-8 characters. It was installed from sources (directly with "make && sudo make install"), and apparently multibyte support is not there by default.
To fix that, I just had to pass appropriate options to configure:
$ cd ~/vim72/src
$ ./configure --with-features=big --enable-multibyte
Finally, to make my mutt 1.5.19 happy, I had to remove "charset" option from the configuration file.
That's about it!