i18n shell in windows

Question

Is there an i18n shell in windows that supports a large character set? Testing my application in windows results in some math characters not being rendered correctly. The Lucida font in cmd.exe and powershell do not have a wide enough selection.

Unicode UTF-8 would be the most preferable, followed by the other Unicode encodings.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is a problem in the font or the console itself but you could try installing the DejaVu Sans Mono font and see if that provides the necessary characters.

Answer 2

CMD.EXE supports it just fine; the issue is that it is doesn't allow a whole lot of other fonts by default and Lucida Console, usually the only TrueType font there, has no fonts defined in the font fallback chain. See http://www.siao2.com/2008/03/19/8323216.aspx and the screenshots I link to in the comments for that blog post.

You may want to see http://www.siao2.com/2006/10/19/842895.aspx on how to make more fonts appear amongst those you can choose as the main console font.

Also, make sure that your application really uses a Unicode codepage for its output - http://illegalargumentexception.blogspot.com/2009/04/i18n-unicode-at-windows-command-prompt.html probably explains the issue better than I could (or, at the very least, as well as I could).

Answer 3

I just found the ActiveState Tcl does a really good job with tkcon.

When starting tkcon.tcl, I just have to type:

encoding system utf-8

It works well and even has tab completion. Of course, it is a Tcl shell and not a system shell.

It seems to be able to find characters for all of the symbols I am currently using in the test suite for my application.

Answer 4

While working under Windows, I use the DejaVu Sans Mono font along with Console for getting better Unicode (UTF-8) support.