[Konsole-devel] How to switch current gnome-terminal/konsole charset from shell

[Alexander GQ Gerasiov]

Hi there.

Many people work in multilingual or at least multicharset environments.
E.g. sometimes I switch from ru_RU.UTF-8 to ru_RU.KOI8-R and back.
Other peoples may want to switch from ru_RU.KOI8-R to ru_RU.CP1251.

The problem not in cyrillic charsets but in situation when user had to
switch from one charset to another. (May be latin1 <-> utf-8).

Both and gnome/gtk's VteTerminal and konsole allow user to define
charset somewhere in menu. That's nice, but annoying. User should not
only change locale, but also switch something in GUI.

Is it possible to rule terminal from shell? Sure, there are some ESC
sequences which should be processed by terminal application.

I looked trough ISO 2022 and ECMA-48. Wow! Got it! There is some
ability to choose charsets... Unfortunatly not any charset, but only
several which are defined in ISO 2022. That's pity.

But at least it allows to switch terminal to utf-8 ("ESC % G" sequence).
And digging through sources of VteTerminal and konsole I found that
they really support this standard.

But how can I specify charsets other then utf-8?
In the past there where X11 extension to ISO 2022, which allows to
specify encoding by "ESC % / N length charset STX". But it's obsolete.

What can we do? Well, every terminal application for X supports some
standard extensions. At least specifying window title as it was proposed
by classic XTerm. So the question is:
Could we extend standard and use some OSC sequence for this?
How could this extension be supported both by gnome/kde? Or may be this
should be proposed to freedesktop.org?

====quote====
Sequence: OSC or ESC ]
Mnemonic: OSC
Description: Operating system command

OSC is used as the opening delimiter of a control string for operating
system use. The command string following may consist of a sequence of
bit combinations in the range 00/08 to 00/13 and 02/00 to 07/14.  The
control string is closed by the terminating delimiter STRING
TERMINATOR (ST). The interpretation of the command string depends on
the relevant operating system.
====endofquote====

Something like "ESC ] C ; charset_name BEL (or ST)" would allow us to
specify charset from shell.

I could provide patch for both gnome_vte_terminal and konsole if needed.
But would they include it?

-- 
Best regards,
 Alexander GQ Gerasiov

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