9.7.12 UTF-8 support for the X terminal emulator

UTF-8 support for X terminal emulator is provided by the uxterm program in the xterm package for XFree86 4.x. It enables support for all languages. It is a wrapper around the xterm(1) program that invokes the latter program with the "UXTerm" X resource class set.

For example, to enable nice large display of English, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean characters, add following to your ~/.Xresources after installing all the pertinent fonts:

     ! set large font
     UXTerm*font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1
     ! Use XIM for Japanese
     *inputMethod: kinput2

Then run xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources to update X resources as described in X resources, Section 9.4.10.

Although most of the popular console program packages such as vim, mutt, and emacs have been made compatible with UTF-8 recently (Woody-Sarge). Program such as mc still is not UTF-8 compatible but simply 8-bit clean. If you are editing 7 bit ASCII part of unknown or mixed encoding file, it is safer to use the locale unaware 8-bit clean editor.

See The Unicode HOWTO.