Mined Unicode Howto

Environment setup and Usage of mined for Unicode text



Environment setup:

  • Mined is a text mode editor. Its UTF-8 support is available for example with the newer versions of xterm (>= 145 recommended). Configure xterm with the option "--enable-wide-chars" or use this xterm configuration script. Then invoke "make".
  • Install Unicode fonts for your X server.
  • Invoke xterm in UTF-8 mode by resource configuration or command parameter. Also configure the environment of the shell running in the xterm to indicate UTF-8 encoding to applications using the appropriate LC_... variables.
    • I recommend to invoke xterm with my Unicode xterm invocation script uterm.

  • How to use UTF-8 modes with mined:

    Screen handling
    If you have arranged (as suggested above) an appropriate environment setting that indicates a UTF-8 terminal, mined will set up its display mode accordingly.
    Character encoding
    By default, mined detects automatically if the text in an edited file is UTF-8 encoded (Unicode character set) or 8-bit encoded (Latin-1 character set).
    It also detects UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode representation with surrogate pairs for a 21-bit character set) and transforms it automatically into UTF-8.
    UTF-8 is the internal representation of mined's Unicode editing. It also handles illegal UTF-8 sequences transparently so if you accidentally open a Latin-1 file in UTF-8 mode, or a file with mixed parts, you may still edit the contents and will not loose any information. You can switch the interpretation while editing by clicking on the L/U letter in the flags area (right part of top line) or toggle "UTF-8 text" in the eXtra menu.
    Manual mode specification is also available
    In order to enable detection and handling of Unicode line ends (line separator and paragraph separator), invoke mined with mined -uu [«filenames ...»] .
    Please consult the manual page for further options.
    Unicode display on non-Unicode terminal
    If a UTF-8 file is edited in a Latin-1 terminal environment, characters outside of the Latin-1 range (greater than 0xFF) are displayed as a block symbol ¤ with special indications for wide and combining characters.


    Bidirectional display:

  • Run mined in a bidirectional terminal (e.g. mlterm).
  • Invoke mined with the parameter -o to suppress scrollbar display (would confuse with the terminal's bidi algorithm). You may configure your environment for this option:
    MINED=o; export MINED

  • Mined homepage and download.
    Thomas Wolff