On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 07:50:08PM -0600, Derek Martin wrote: > On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 02:52:22PM -0800, Chip Camden wrote: > > inside rxvt-unicode (urxvt) v9.07 > > > > and I can't seem to get unicode characters to display properly. I have: > > > > set charset="utf-8" > > This comes up often enough that it should probably be a FAQ... > > First off, don't set charset. You shouldn't need to, and -- unless > you're doing something very funky and you really, really know what > you're doing -- having to do this means your environment is not set up > properly. Most likely, setting this manually will only work against > you. > > [...]
+1 In general, using an off-the-shelf desktop on Linux/*BSD/Solaris should cause everything to be in order, particularly if you use a UTF-8 locale to begin with. When everything's in order (you have the necessary locales and fonts installed, and you're using blessed desktops / start scripts) then you will have the locale environment variables properly setup and your tools will find their fonts/renderers and codeset conversion modules and so on. Mutt too will be able to do codeset conversions and thus display foreign characters to the best of your locale's ability. If you must use a non-UTF-8 locale yet want to be able to use UTF-8 for your mutt instances (e.g., to be able to display more characters than your locale allows, or to be able send mail using UTF-8 as your locale), then you'll want to run a terminal emulator that allows you to pick an encoding: set the encoding of the terminal where you run mutt to UTF-8, make sure to change the locale env vars accordingly in that session, and start mutt. For example, gnome-terminal allows you to set the encoding on a per-tab basis. But it's better to just use a UTF-8 locale for all your sessions and work. Nico --
