I decided that I wanted to see accented characters, other character sets, and basically move out of the 70s on my terminal screens. So, I went hunting for the settings to make my system think in Unicode. I started here and it seemed to go okay, but I still couldn’t see most of the characters in this. After much tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth, it turns out that Eterm, which I understood to be Unicode compatible, isn’t. At least, mine isn’t. So, I decided to use Urxvt, which is Rxvt with Unicode support.

The funny thing is, once I decided to use urxvt I ended up spending more time configuring it than I ever did getting Unicode (specifically UTF-8) set as my default character set. I’m pretty happy with it now though – you can check out my config file over in the configs section. The only problem left is that I don’t know how to type accented characters, but I figure I’ll figure it out eventually.