Re: PATCH: multibyte FAQ

[Danek Duvall <duvall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 05:13:24PM +0000, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> No, not really.  The set of multibyte characters depends on the current
> locale setting, and there are potentially thousands of them, most of
> which will be broken by "bindkey -m".

Oh, of course.  I was thinking only of UTF-8 again.

> } In xterm at least, you can control whether the meta key sets the
> } eighth bit or sends an escape character depending on the values of the
> } eightBitInput and metaSendsEscape resources.
> 
> That doesn't have the desired effect for me, because eightBitInput has
> to be false, which AFAICT means you can't send multibyte characters
> either.  Am I doing something wrong, or is my xterm version too old?

Not sure, as I haven't actually tried it, and I don't have any non-ascii
keys on my keyboard to try it anyway, but from my reading of the xterm man
page (version 205), it might be the case that it can distinguish between
eight-bit characters and key combinations M-<x> (the description in
metaSendsEscape isn't clear, IMHO), and so setting both eightBitInput and
metaSendsEscape to true would allow eight-bit characters to be sent cleanly
to the terminal, and when you type M-<x>, xterm sends ESC-<x>.

You probably also need to set "utf8: true" or "locale: true" or "locale:
utf8" for multibyte character sets to work properly.

I'm sure Thomas could set the record straight here.

Danek