What Unicode editors are there on Unix?

Yudit

Gaspar Sinai's Unicode editor Yudit is a must-have, the best in contemporary Unicode support on Unix and has a lot of features worth imitating.

Emacs

GNU Emacs 20 includes the MULE multilingual extension which unfortunately avoids Unicode and uses some non-standard internal encoding. Otfried Cheong has already written a unicode.el and utf2mule module to use UTF-8 within GNU Emacs 20.3. There is hope that Emacs 21 will turn to Unicode completely. Richard Stallman is being advised by the emacs-unicode@gnu.org circle. Since Emacs is not just an editor but a programmable Lisp environment its Unicode support will help a lot to read and write web pages, mails and news in UTF-8 and run shells and other tools in a UTF-8 environment. Emacs has already been using 24-bit-characters (atoms) internally for quite a while.

Wily & Co.

The powerful but uneasy to handle Plan9 derivates Wily and 9term and Rob Pike's text editor Sam for Unix are all based on Rob Pike's libXg and can be used to edit UTF-8 text.

UCEdit

Mark Leisher's Multilingual Unicode Text Toolkit MUTT is a Motif-based tool suite with many interesting features (Arabic, combining characters, Tcl input methods) but so far only available as Linux binary prerelease without any documentation besides wonderful presentations.

VI & Co.

In November 1998, I wrote: The availability of usable Unicode terminals could fuel Unicode support on termcap/curses-based editors like the traditional Berkeley Unix visual editor vi.

mined

In July 1999, the first editor to fulfill the stated prophecy in the UTF-8-enabled xterm is Thomas Wolff's minimal editor mined 98.

QEmacs

A minimalistic Emacs-lookalike to run in the xterm -u8 amended by Robert Brady and by Tomohiro Kubota is QEmacs by Fabrice Bellard

Roman Czyborra
February 21, 2001