Terminal emulators

Terminal emulators, such as xterm, provide a GUI interface to the Linux command-line. Newer versions of xterm are Unicode-aware. GNOME comes with a xterm replacement, gnome-terminal, and likewise, KDE has the konsole terminal emulator. These are typically available on any new Linux distribution. Besides these, two other terminal emulators with Unicode capabilities are rxvt-unicode or urxvt, and mlterm. The latter is reputedly very good at handling Indian languages, but as I am not yet familiar with it, it is not discussed here.

gnome-terminal can be put into Unicode mode by running the command unicode_start, or by selecting Unicode mode from the menubar, Terminal -> Character Coding -> Unicode (UTF-8). Once the terminal is in Unicode mode,

  export LANG=or_IN
  date

should show the date in Oriya directly in the terminal, without a need for the intermediate step of saving the output to a file, as in Sec. 4.4. To switch back to the default encoding, use either Terminal -> Character Coding -> Current Locale, or run the command unicode_stop. unicode_start and unicode_stop should work for any xterm-compatible terminal emulator, i.e., almost all of them, but I have not tried this in other terminals.