Setting up your terminal

If you need to display characters that are not defined in the lower 7 bits of the general ASCII encoding, you might have problems if you choose the wrong terminal character encoding. Character encodings are a complex issue, so I will restrict this to the basics of ISO8859-1 and UTF-8 encodings and setting up your terminal emulator correctly.

I noticed when I tried to issue:

man --locale=fr vim

the output did not look right. After much experimentation, I discovered it was because my terminal was set up to display UTF-8 characters, but in this case, my French man pages needed my terminal to be set up to display ISO8859-1 characters!

The solution was to change my settings for my terminal to be ISO8859-1. How you do this will vary by terminal emulator. In my case, I use iTerm2 on a Mac, and I did:

Right-click terminal
Choose Edit Session
Select Terminal
Change Character Encoding to Western (ASCII)

Here is a forum entry that discusses this in more detail with specifics for Linux: character encodings supported by more cat and less.