UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm trying to edit a file with vi, but all special characters (áéíóú etc) don't seem to show correctly. They don't seem to be supported by the OS (SunOS 5.10).

I'm using MobaXterm as the terminal emulator, which is configured to use ISO-8859-1. The same charset is used on Solaris.

If I open a local shell, I am able to use these characters.

Can anyone tell me why this is, and how I can get it to work?

Thanks

Not in vi, but vim has both file header and command line options, which should work in the .exrc, too: Forcing UTF-8 Vim to read Latin1 as Latin1 - Vim Tips Wiki

vi/ex seem the worst documented part of UNIX, which is one reason to get vim, which is free and can usually be installed as a user app if the root Gods do not see the need. Vim docs tell you negatively what vi options are, e.g., http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldo...encodings'

Unfortunately we don't have vim on this machine

On Solaris, you need root to addpkg, and binary distributions are almost always in pkg form, so I often build open source apps from a downloaded source tar with something like:

Code:

cd <download_head_dir>
mkdir -p $HOME/myroot/usr/local
./configure --prefix=$HOME/myroot/usr/local
make install

The thing is that I can't even paste these characters in my terminal, only the local terminal. So it's a more general problem.