How to make UTF-8 work with Irssi

This can be a pain to figure out sometimes. I have found that these settings work on all UTF-8-equipped systems I've tried so far. There may be redundancy in these instructions, but I haven't bothered to experiment with what's really necessary and what's not. These settings works for me.

1. Make your terminal use UTF-8

Choose UTF-8 as your character set in the settings of your PuTTY or whatever other terminal you use.

2. Make your screen use UTF-8

In your screen, type ctrl-a, : (colon), then type utf8 on on. After this, always attach your screen with the parameter -U on the command line. That is, screen -rU.

3. Make your Irssi use UTF-8

Use the following settings in Irssi:

• /set term_charset utf-8
• /set recode on
• /set recode_out_default_charset utf-8
• /set recode_fallback iso-8859-1
• /set recode_autodetect_utf8 on
• /set recode_transliterate on

Note that you usually need to press ctrl-l in Irssi after changing settings to make it redraw the contents. Also note that this will only fix text you receive after you've changed the settings, so everything before that stays broken.