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 only inconvenience is that emacs is still treating the russian characters as special ones, so it doesn't recognize russian words' bounds and case changes. To fix it, you have to modify the syntax and case tables of emacs:
;; there is a garbage in the variables below, since SGML doesn't like
;; cyrillic characters. You have to put the uppercase and lowercase
;; parts of the Russian alphabet respectively (see the actual files)
(setq *russian-abc-ucase* "*** SGML SUCKS ***")
(setq *russian-abc-lcase* "*** SGML SUCKS ***")
(let ((i 0)
(len (length *russian-abc-ucase*)))
(while (< i len)
(modify-syntax-entry (elt *russian-abc-ucase* i) "w ")
(modify-syntax-entry (elt *russian-abc-lcase* i) "w ")
(set-case-syntax-pair (elt *russian-abc-ucase* i)
(elt *russian-abc-lcase* i)
(standard-case-table))
(setq i (+ i 1))))
For this purpose I created a rusup.el file which
does this, as well as a couple handy functions. You have to load it in
your ~/.emacs.
Another alternative 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.
There is an
rspell add-on created by Neal Dalton (nrd@cray.com) for
the GNU ispell package, but I experienced some problems making it
work right away. Try it - maybe you will be luckier.