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Fidelis
Asked: 2018-11-01 06:47:54 +0800 CST

Gnome-terminal and Xfce4-terminal with ISO-encoding needs special-character keys to be pressed twice

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In a gnome-terminal as well as in a xfce4-terminal, when I change its character-encoding from standard UTF-8 (with 2 bytes for special-characters) to ISO-Latin 8859-15 (always 1 byte), the following happens:

While outputting of ISO-Latin encoded text works fine, for example:

cat textfile-iso-latin.txt

However input isn't working as expected. When I enter a special character (like Umlaut, Sonderzeichen, äöü) with the keyboard in the very same terminal, I need to hit the key on the keyboard twice in order to make it display.

Is the keyboard still in UTF-8 mode where such special characters take two bytes? How would I change this behaviour in order to make this hiccup disappear?

Thanks.

gnome-terminal special-characters encoding utf-8 xfce4-terminal

1 Answers

  1. The easiest way to get ISO-Latin encoded input and output in my bash shell running in a full UTF-8 environment (as usual with Ubuntu) is to use the workaround which has been mentioned in a related but not identical question here: "Switch encoding of terminal with a command"

    When in my UTF-8 xfce-terminal or gnome-terminal I run my old ISO-Latin encoded programs like this:

    luit -encoding iso-8859-15 gawk -f script.awk

    … then the luit tool converts the ISO-Latin encoded input and output of my program (an Awk script in that case) to the UTF-8 encoded terminal.

    This workaround works fine (so far).

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