Write accents in pine

Write accents in pine
Patch is available for versions:
pine 4.10 pine 4.20 pine 4.21 pine 4.30 pine 4.31 pine 4.32 pine 4.33 pine 4.40 pine 4.41 pine 4.42 pine 4.43 pine 4.44 pine 4.50 pine 4.51 pine 4.52 pine 4.53 pine 4.55 pine 4.56 pine 4.58 pine 4.60 pine 4.61 pine 4.62 pine 4.63 pine 4.64

This patch allows you to write many kind of accents in pine and pico. You can write characters like á, or ç, or ü, etc. Each character is introduced using a consistent combination of keystrokes. The first keystroke is always "^\". Then you write the kind of accent you want to write and finally the letter over which you want the accent to be written, so á would be written ^\'a. Also you can write ¿ and ¡ using the keystrokes ^\? and ^\! respectively.

Note that you need to set your character-set variable to a value different than US-ASCII (for example, you can set it to ISO-8859-1), otherwise this patch will not work (thanks to Haroon Rafique by suggesting to add this paragraph).

The following is the complete list of characters added in this patch:

áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚýÝ (press ^\' char)
àèìòùÀÈÌÒÙ (press ^\` char)
äëïöüÄËÏÖÜÿ (press ^\" char) (the ÿ character was suggested by Andreas Prilop)
âêîôûÂÊÎÔÛ (press ^\^ char)
ãÃõÕñÑ (press ^\~ char)
åÅ (press ^\o char)
çÇ (press ^\, char)
¿¡ (press ^\ inverted char)
ß (press ^\s) (suggested and patched by Chuck Durfee)
£ (press ^\l or ^\-l)
ø (press ^\o/ or ^\ / o)
ªº (press ^\- char)
°¹²³ (press ^\^ number)
æ Æ (press ^\a e)
©® (press ^\o char)

Note: Although pico search style is case insensitive, the patch will always differentiate between á and Á. You can use this behavior to leave "marks" in selected places in your file and return to them later.

Starting in version 4.33 now you can write accents and special characters in the headers of the message if you need to.

In some terminals using the above combinations do not work. The reason is because the screen is expecting a different sequence of characters to write the accent in the screen. If you have this problem please make sure that your screen is setup to display iso-8859-1, or equivalent. If your terminal is setup to display utf-8, the above process will not work!. The Gnome terminal can be configured by choosing Terminal > Character Coding > Add or remove and then adding iso-8859-1 (under Western). In the case of Konsole, I have found that you can not do this as with Gnome, but you need to set the LANG variable to be en_US (or equivalent), without the ".UTF-8" part at the end of it, and then start konsole.

Note: Pine help says that they don't use the key "^\". In particular this patch as it is can not be part of the distribution of pine. I may end up putting this patch and the one below together as one feature (this means to duplicate the functions of ^J not only to justify, but also to enter accents). In any case I will have to keep separate patches if I do that.

Last Updated 19:44:31 PDT Wed Sep 28 2005.