Re: vi international character display

["Ian D. Leroux" <idleroux%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

Quoting Takehiko NOZAKI <takehiko.nozaki%gmail.com@localhost> (Sun, 13 Nov 2011
23:17:45 +0900):
> > - The environment, which I'm fairly certain I didn't modify around
> > the time I observed the change, includes
> >  TERM=rxvt-unicode
> 
> it seems that  TERM=rxvt-unicode(may be added by you, default
> terminfo database doesn't know such term type, so nvi may die
> quickly) lost capability to display i18n text.

I'm not so sure.  I did install the terminfo entry to my personal
database (following the instructions in the package installation
message).  But even if I move .terminfo.db aside and then run exactly
the commands you list below:

> 1. start urxvt with utf-8 locale.
> $ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 urxvt
> 
> 2. in urxvt, launch vi with vt100 terminal
> $ TERM=vt100 vi foo.txt

I get \xe9 instead of é.  I also get the same results in an xterm
(i.e. non-ascii works for less, but not for vi)

For reference, here's the stripped-down environment I used for the
xterm test:
$ printenv
_=/usr/bin//printenv
PATH=/home/idleroux/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin:/usr/X11R7/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/games:/usr/bin/:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin
XTERM_VERSION=XTerm(271)
WINDOWPATH=4
DISPLAY=:0
PWD=/home/idleroux
XAUTHORITY=/home/idleroux/.Xauthority
XTERM_SHELL=/bin/ksh
TERM=xterm
WINDOWID=16777229
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
XTERM_LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8
ENV=/home/idleroux/.shrc
LOGNAME=idleroux

When I change the locale to en_US.ISO8859-15 (as suggested by Martin
Husemann), vi displays accented characters again.

So it looks like the behaviour I'm seeing is not specific to urxvt
(since I can reproduce it with xterm), affects UTF-8 but not ISO8859
(single-byte?) locales, and depends on some yet-unidentified other
variable because you can't reproduce it.

Could you show your complete printenv output so I can try to run a test
in an identical environment?

-- IDL