Another usability thing with linux today are locales, especially character sets.

I use de_DE@euro.UTF-8, since i hope we can get rid of any other character set on the long run… This works great except for a couple of things.

First is zsh. I really like zsh, but it needs support for UTF-8, not having properly working Backspace or Left-Right-Keys (you need to press it twice for stepping over 2-byte-chars, and the display is broken then) really sucks.

The second problem is when working on machines with different character sets.

I often ssh to a machine - the one i read mail on when not on my notebook, the one this blog is on etc. - and the default locale there uses latin9.

Well, latin9 in fact is the obvious choice, since i usually ssh there from latin9 or latin1 boxes. But sometimes i ssh there from a UTF-8 account.

I don’t know what is the proper solution: either ssh should forward the character set used on the client to the server (so my sh scripts on the server can set the locales appropriately, assuming that woody has enough UTF-8 support already), or maybe ssh should get the charset somehow from the server and convert (which is broken by design IMHO).

Usually i start a terminal emulator with the appropriate charset and use that to ssh. This brings me to another issue i really have to file a bug against: gnome-terminal. I like it because it can run multiple terminal windows and such.

But WHY is the charset not included in its profiles? Instead i have to enable the menu bar, choose the charset, disable it again.