On 10/28/2009 09:10 AM Alfred von Campe wrote: > On Oct 27, 2009, at 19:28, ken wrote: > >> E.g., create a file with vi with just one German/Greek/French word, >> say, >> Έντελέχεια (Entylecheia, an ancient Greek word). If the >> name of the >> file is "nonenglish", then, after you do your save in vim, run the >> shell >> commands >> >> touch temp; mv temp $(cat nonenglish) > > I guess my issue is how these characters get generated in the first > place. By cutting and pasting the word "Έντελέχεια" from > your email into a file on Linux (via the Synergy mouse & keyboard > sharing utility no less), I was able to create a file containing that > word and also named that word and display it correctly with cat and > ls. So UTF-8 encoding appears to work just fine. It's 8-byte > characters in ISO 8859-1 encoding that are causing my problem. > Fortunately, I think I don't have to deal with ISO 8859-1 encodings, > and my problem was self-created by cutting and pasting characters > from the iso_8859-1 man page. > > Now I have a follow up question: so far I've only been able to enter > non-ASCII characters on my Linux system by cutting & pasting; how do > I actually generate any of these characters on a system with a US > keyboard? > > Thanks for all that have helped me solve this problem. > > Alfred There are a lot of keyboard configuration files under /lib/kbd/keymaps/. One of these is loaded at boot-time, probably the one you configured in when you first set up the system. I don't know all the steps you'll need to do-- I've never tried to do what you're doing-- but read the xmodmap manpage and then examine the keycodes in the keymap files mentioned above. For example, mk-utf.map.gz under /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty has coding to toggle one keymap to another. IOW, you'd type in one language, hit a couple keys to toggle the keyboard into another language, and then hit another couple/three hotkeys to get back to English... or whichever your home language is. Unless there's some app I don't know about, this is going to be a lot of work, especially if you have to figure out how keymaps work. But work it out and you'll be linux-famous. Document everything.