Unicode

A re-occuring problem I have had with computers is encodings. As an English speaker I have not need anything except ASCII, but all the same it is annoying when I can’t read some Korean spam.

So on my system I have changed some things:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

My bash locale is now"

hendry@bilbo:/tmp$ printenv | grep -i utf

LC_ALL=en_GB.UTF-8

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8

I’ve added a couple of lines to my editor config .vimrc

set encoding=utf-8

set fileencoding=utf-8

And my mailer mutt (mutt-utf8 package in Debian!) config .muttrc

set charset="utf-8"

In Gnome’s preferred applications(under desktop preferences -> advanced) for Terminal I’ve put uxterm. Update: Don’t use Gnome. Use something like Ion instead, and setup the terminal emulator system wide, like so:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

• Try isutf8 from moreutils
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
• http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
• http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/