Generally, to set the certain utility up to handle the Cyrillic requires just to allow the 8 bit input. In some cases it is required to tell the application to show the extended ASCII characters in their "native" form.
Three variables should be set on order to make bash understand the
8-bit characters. The best place is ~/.inputrc
file. The following should be set:
set meta-flag on set convert-meta off set output-meta on
The following should be set in .cshrc:
setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_5 stty pass8
If you don't have the POSIX stty (impossible for Linux), then
replace the last call to the following:
stty -istrip cs8
The minimal cyrillic support in emacs is done by adding the following
calls to one's .emacs (provided that the Cyrillic character set
support is installed for console or X respectively):
(standard-display-european t) (set-input-mode (car (current-input-mode)) (nth 1 (current-input-mode)) 0)
This allows the user to view and input documents in Russian.
However, such mode is not of a big convenience because emacs doesn't
recognize the usual keyboard commands while set in Cyrillic input
mode. There are a number of packages which use the different
approach. They don't rely on the input mode stuff established by the
environment (either X or console. Instead, they allow the user to
switch the input mode by the special emacs command and emacs
itself is responsible for re-mapping the character set. The author
took a chance to look at three of them. The russian.el package by
Valery Alexeev (ava@math.jhu.edu) allows the user to switch
between cyrillic and regular input mode and to translate the contents
of a buffer from one Cyrillic coding standard to another (which is
especially useful while reading the texts imported from MS-DOG). The
rustable.el (sorry, I don't know the author of it) adds the
syntax rules of Cyrillic codeset to emacs (words' bounds, case
change rules etc.) These packages can be found at most Emacs-Lisp
archives. Another one is the package remap which tries to
make such support more generic. This package is written by Per
Abrahamsen (abraham@iesd.auc.dk) and is accessible at
ftp.iesd.auc.dk.
As for the author's opinion, I would suggest to start using the
russian.el package because it is very easy to setup and use.
Check the
sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/academic/russian-studies/Software for
the russian dictionary created by Neal Dalton (nrd@cray.com) for
the ispell package.
So far, less doesn't support the KOI-8 character set, but the
following environment variable will do the job:
LESSCHARSET=latin1
Set the following resource:
*documentFonts*registry: koi8
Use 'rlogin -8'