Terminal Emulators

Index

• Introduction
• Kterm
• krxvt
• Xterm
• Xterm (XFree86 4.0 and later)
• Rxvt

Introduction

It is more difficult for terminal emulators to support multiple languages than for window managers. It is because:

• Terminal emulators have to use fixed-width fonts. However, some fonts has 'double' width. For example, if 8-dot-width font is used for ISO-8859-1, 16-dot-width font has to be used for JISX0208 Japanese and KSC5601 Korean. The 'double-width' characters must exactly double visual width.
• Window managers don't need to care about codesets because LOCALE mechanism and X library care about them.
• Window managers need only to display. Terminal emulators have to move the cursor, erase characters, and so on so on.
• Window managers receive strings to be displayed at once. Terminal emulator receive one by one. Even multibyte characters are devided into bytes.

Kterm, an ISO2022-based international version of xterm, can display Japanese.

This is an example of multilingual output. The 'hello' file is written in ISO 2022 encoding.

krxvt, an rxvt compiled with Japanese option, can display Japanese.

Xterm cannot display Japanese. ISO8859-1 codeset is used improperly to display EUC-JP coded Japanese.

The following is an example of (improper) multilingual output. Note that even ISO8859-1 language (German and Spanish) cannot displayed if it is coded by ISO2022.

Xterm in XFree86 4.0 can handle UTF-8 encoding. It can display doublewidth and combining characters, including Japanese.

Original Rxvt cannot display Japanese.