From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Aug 23 11:04:32 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 209341065679 for ; Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:04:32 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dickey@saltmine.radix.net) Received: from saltmine.radix.net (saltmine.radix.net [207.192.128.40]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D53768FC15 for ; Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:04:31 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dickey@saltmine.radix.net) Received: from saltmine.radix.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by saltmine.radix.net (8.12.2/8.12.2) with ESMTP id m7NB46h6013811; Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:04:06 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from dickey@localhost) by saltmine.radix.net (8.12.2/8.12.2/Submit) id m7NB46H3013810; Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:04:06 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:04:06 -0400 From: Thomas Dickey To: Ed Schouten Message-ID: <20080823110406.GB10445@saltmine.radix.net> References: <3cb459ed0808230256g3f0f51epd9ab54047d3bd681@mail.gmail.com> <20080823102656.GE99951@hoeg.nl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20080823102656.GE99951@hoeg.nl> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.27i Cc: FreeBSD Current , Alexander Churanov Subject: Re: Unicode-based FreeBSD X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:04:32 -0000 On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 12:26:56PM +0200, Ed Schouten wrote: > Hello Alexander, > > * Alexander Churanov 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