Thursday, April 14, 2005

In its default configuration, the terminal command line application automatically escapes Japanese and other multibyte characters into octal sequences, which is rather disappointing considering OS X's otherwise excellent multilingual support.

The following steps enable Japanese in terminal, assuming you are using bash (although they might work for other shells too).

1. Via File->Show Info select the Emulation section and uncheck the option Escape non-ASCII characters (非ASCII文字をエスケープする).
2. In your .inputrc file add the following lines:

   set convert-meta off
   set meta-flag on
   set output-meta on

The next terminal window you start should now display Japanese properly.

Posted at 9:39 PM |Comments (0)