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Any rxvt-Sized Unicode-Aware Terminal Emulators?
Viqsi writes "Just on a lark, I started a short while back to try to convert my environment totally to UTF-8. One of the big hangups that I've run into so far, however, is my X terminal emulator. I've been very happy with rxvt (I tend to have several $XTERMs open at once, so Low Memory is Good!), but it doesn't seem to support anything Unicode. A bit of searching has turned up nothing that isn't as big as or larger than xterm itself. So, the question -- are there any low-memory terminal emulators that support UTF-8, or any other Unicode encoding? (tabbed-window style terminals Don't Count, and that goes double for Konsole!)"
It's not much for the internal strings (function names, variables, etc.), more for the messages that the kernel can send to the user (or root). For the first kind of strings, you'd have to redefine the C standard, and change compiler (and maybe also change text editor).
When it boots, there's a whole slew of lines, many of which are purely numbers, but some of them could be localized (just as a big part of userland is). Now, since it would be in kernelspace, you'd maybe want to choose which one at compile time, but if you don't have access to a kind of Unicode for outputting strings, your choice of supported languages will be quite small.
Now, this doesn't go in the argument if it's a desired behavior or not, just that it's something necessary before outputting for any language.
You can use gnome-terminal with the --use-factory option. It makes one process for all your terms, so if you have a lot of windows open, it doesn't use that much memory.