Unicode-based FreeBSD

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 12:26:56PM +0200, Ed Schouten wrote:
> Hello Alexander,
> 
> * Alexander Churanov <alexanderchuranov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 1) Is unicode support in character-mode (I mean plain tty, not Xorg) FreeBSD
> > human interface alreay implemented?
> 
> Yes and no.
> 
> Right now, you can just use UTF-8 inside ncurses and there is nothing
> that actually stops you from writing pieces of console software that
> supports UTF-8.

...but it does help if the terminal can display the result.

> But there is one problem with TTY's: when you switch your terminal to
> canonical mode (where it processes entire lines of text at a time), it
> cannot properly perform backspace on exotic characters, because the
> characters are both variadic in bytes and columns. Linux has this IUTF8
> flag for termios, which we don't support (yet).

...before IUTF8, there was some consensus for a few years that it was
up to the application to do proper backspacing.  (ncurses does this anyway,
but apparently shell interpreters such as bash need extra assistance).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net