Paradox Designs

If you are at all like me, and i suspect someone is, you will use software on systems it wasn’t designed for. I use Irssi for chatting, on windows, due to its supereor functionality to many other clients. Unfortunately, a side effect of using software on systems it wasn’t designed for is having to use a series of workarounds to make it function. I had fixed most everything with Irssi, except for UTF-8 rendering. I fixed that today.

UTF-8((Also known as Unicode. Has a number of international symbols that one will encounter at various times, especially in international chats)) is a must have. Unfortunatly, Irssi on windows doesn’t support it by default. Getting it to support it is not a trivial process.

First up, you want to set Irssi to accept utf as your default charset. This is done by typing the following in your entry line

/set term_charset utf-8
/save

Now, your ready to make PuTTY accept it. Pull up your PuTTY config page, navigate to the Translations page, and select UTF-8 from the drop down list. Return to the main page and save this as your Irssi configuration, or your default if you don’t have a different one specified.

If this works for you, good, but for me there was one more step. I had to pull up Cygwin, and type export LANG=en_us.utf8. Close your Cygwin session, and exit out of your Irssi session. Restart your Irssi, and ask the people in your favorite channel((Thanks goes to the various people of the #tremulous channel on freenode for helping me along)) to send a few UTF characters. You should be good to go.

You can input utf characters by Copy and paste, international keyboard layout, and their alt+ commands.