Gero Treuner:
> > I acquired xterm-117, which seems to support utf-8 at least to the
> > extent that it looks right when I cat a utf-8 file to the terminal.
> > However, if I run mutt in the xterm, with charset=utf-8, it doesn't
> > look right:
>
> Mutt assumes to have an 8-bit clean terminal for the best case, all
> characters are sent as byte wide numbers to the terminal and supposed
> to be displayed directly using the current font. With a utf-8 terminal
> characters 128 and above are interpreted as utf-8 sequences, which
> leads to unexpected results.
>
> Currently it isn't possible to make mutt use more than 8-bit character
> sets plus the few terminal graphic characters. The reason: The ncurses
> library currently don't support this. First there has to be a usuable
> utf-8 xterm implementation, then ncurses can be improved to handle
> wide characters (ready at version 6?), and finally mutt can be changed
> to be aware of this extension (it works with unicode internally already).
> All this may take a year at least, I think.
I think you're being pessimistic!
There is already a usable utf-8 xterm: patch level 117 seems to work,
as I mentioned, and it will find its way into standard XFree86
releases before long.
There's at least one editor that runs in a utf-8 xterm: mined98. There
is information about this and related topics in the Unicode-HOWTO.
I built mined linked with ncurses, but it's possible that it bypasses
curses to some extent.
It's true that ncurses and slang don't understand wide characters, but
what really stops mutt from running in a utf-8 xterm is bugs in mutt.
I have corrected some of those and am sending a patch to mutt-dev.
It does now seem to work to an acceptable extent. Presumably tabs and
line breaks are wrong, and sometimes slang gets confused by utf-8 and
redraws some screen lines incorrectly, but you can just press C-l to
tidy things up. It's usable. And I can see Russian, Greek, Hungarian,
etc all on the screen at once ...
Edmund
