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I live in Poland, and we have some accented characters - ąćęłńóśźż. Due to various reasons I resurrected "talk" usage on my server, which works great, but I wasn't able to figure out how to make it work with accents.

On both ends of talk I have UTF-8 based locale (en_US.UTF-8), and Polish characters work great in everything - bash, vim, mutt, slrn, everything, but talk.

What is the reason of the problem, and how could it be solved?

I'm using it on Debian testing, and have tried talk/utalk/inetutils-talk, and none of them seems to support unicode/utf8.

What can be done to achieve "talk" with full UTF8 support?

techraf
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user70436
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    Hardly anybody uses talk anymore, so I doubt those implementations have undergone much maintenance. Maybe try using luit to get a latin2 terminal, 8-bit character support should be doable. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jun 03 '14 at 23:52

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indeed for those old programs there is little hope to see them ported to unicode (I have a hard time finding a package to test :) ).

As Gilles said, luit is the pragmatic answer. I used it some time ago for another 8bit only program.

define a bash alias like this:

alias talk='LC_ALL=pl_PL.ISO-8859-2 luit -- talk'

you need luit installed, and the proper 8bit locale too. you can also use talk='luit -encoding 8859-2 -- talk' if you don't have the 8bit locale.

Pablo Saratxaga
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