OS X Terminal UTF-8 issues

Question

Okay, so I finally got myself a MacBook Air after 15 years of linux. And before I got it my big concern was UTF-8 support because no matter if I get files sent to me from windows or mac-clients theres always issues with encoding, while on ubuntu I can be sure that all output no matter what program will produce perfect utf-8 encoded data.

And now on my second day (today) with OS X Im tearing my hair of by frustration. Why?

When I open Nano and type some swedish characters like ÅÄÖ in it, it puts out blank characters at the end of the line (which i guess is the other byte in each character)

When I open python and try using swedish characters, it does not output anything at all

When I connect to a Ubuntu server trough SSH I cant type åäö in bash, tough it works in VIM (still trough SSH). And in nano backspace does not work, but if check the box "Delete sends ctrl+H" in the Terminal preferences, backspace starts working in nano but stops working in VIM.

I've tried unchecking all other encodings then UTF-8 in terminal preferences but that does not seem to work either.

I'm sure that every non US-person must have the same issues, so hove do I fix them? I just want full UTF-8 support... :'(

Answer 1

For me, this helped: I checked locale on my local shell in terminal

$ locale LANG="cs_CZ.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="cs_CZ.UTF-8" 

Then connected to any remote host I am using via ssh and edited file /etc/profile as root - at the end I added line:

export LANG=cs_CZ.UTF-8 

After next connection it works fine in bash, ls and nano.

Answer 2

Go to Terminal -> Preferences -> Advanced (Tab) go down to International and select Unicode (UTF-8) as Character Encoding.

And tick Set locale environment variables on startup.