German umlauts and co

[( Marc A. Lehmann )]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 07:47:53PM +0100, "A. Pagaltzis" <pagaltzis at gmx.de> wrote:
> I'm having trouble understanding how to make urxvt produce
> something sensible when I enter umlauts. I can see that what's
> happening is that the Unicode codepoint is being sent as an
> escape sequence à la ^[[0;f6A in the case of an ö.

f6a is not the unicode code point for ö. you just need to load an
appropriate keymap for your keyboard that generates an ö, and make sure
your selected locale can display ö's.

your current config doesn't generate anything when you press ö, so
rxvt-unicode outputs it's generic "silent key" sequence.

> The manpage says urxvt respects the locale instead of providing
> an application-specific mechanism for configuration, but it's not
> clear to me how to make things work. I currently have LANG and
> LC_ALL set to "C"

that is your problem, as ö is not part of the C locale, so X cannot
generate it.

> rather than 8-bit chars?), but setting this to anything else only
> elicits the message
> 
>     urxvt: default locale unavailable, check LC_* and LANG variables. Continuing.

that means that your system doesn't support the selected locale. try to
install the appropriate support for your OS.

> without any other effect. I don't understand what's going on
> here, since all the locales I tried (variations on ``de_DE'') are
> listed by ``locale -a''.

When urxvt outputs the message you saw then the locale is not supported by
your system. I can't say what's going wrong, but I can say that your libc
claims that it doesn't support it. That is the area where you have to work
on. Maybe you are not setting it correctly?

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