State of Greek and UTF-8 in the Mac OS X Terminal

The Mac OS X Terminal.app application should be ready for utf-8 and thus for working in Greek. But that's not the complete truth. Applications to work in the terminal have to be ready too. The ones that come with Mac OS X are not. I mainly use vi / vim, mutt, lynx. The vim that comes with Mac OS X.3 (Panther) does not sport the multilingual abilities needed. I experimented with compiling my own, but in the end I used an old version I had downloaded from Marc Liyanage at entropy.ch. I custom compiled my own mutt, same with lynx. The point is that you will have to look into your application compile time and runtime settings.

As for the Terminal.app setup itself, in the "Terminal Inspector", the "Character Set Encoding" has to be set to "Unicode (UTF-8)" and "Wide glyphs for Japanese/Chinese/etc." should be set off (contrary to what Apple Help suggests).

What's really ugly is using vim to write in Greek: It's OK while you are in input mode. You just keep writing and input works fine. Then you hit Escape to switch to command mode and every key command either just beeps at you or does something unexpected. The problem is that vi does not know what to do with "ξ" (xi), which is what you get when you hit "j" while in Greek keyboard mode. So the thing is to type "i" (input), switch to Greek keyboard, type your text, switch to non-Greek keyboard again, hit "Escape" (command mode), and continue editing. Also vim wants to be told about using unicode utf-8 explicitly (:set encoding=utf-8).

One day I will set up my vimrc so that command mode will work in the Greek keyboard too, hopefully I just have to remap the Greek letters to vi commands. What I currently do is to type most Greek texts in TextEdit. Not only don't have to struggle with switching keyboards for command mode, but I also enjoy the ASpell spellchecker. See, my spelling in Greek is pretty catastrophic, so I use a lot of suggestions.