Terminal, backslash, and the Japanese keyboard

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Level 1

8 points

Terminal, backslash, and the Japanese keyboard

I have a 2009 13" MacBook Pro with the Japanese keyboard. According to everything I've found, Option-¥ should produce a backslash (\). This seems to work everywhere except in terminal.app, where both ¥ and Option-¥ appear to generate backslashes... (I can type a ¥ by flipping the keyboard to kana mode)

Except...

For irc I use ircII (installed through Fink, version 20030709) and what shows up as a backslash on my end will show up to everybody else as ¥. (I have no apparent way to type a true backslash)

MBP

Posted on Nov 30, 2009 2:13 PM

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Answer 1

K T

Level 7

23,895 points

Nov 30, 2009 2:40 PM in response to Joshua Hesse

Hi Joshua Hesse & welcome to discussions...

Avoid the choice of Shift_JIS as the default encoding for the terminal Window - don't use Shift_JIS for anything if you can avoid it. This particular encoding not only replaces the 'backslash' with the 'yen' symbol, it also replaces the 'tilde' symbol with the 'overline'.

Change the terminal encoding to EUC-JP and the terminal should act normally.

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

123,020 points

Nov 30, 2009 3:00 PM in response to Joshua Hesse

For irc I use ircII (installed through Fink, version 20030709) and what shows up as a backslash on my end will show up to everybody else as ¥. (I have no apparent way to type a true backslash)

Is "everyone else" in Japan? I think it used to be they expected backslash to appear as yen...

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.aspx

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Answer 3

Joshua Hesse Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 30, 2009 3:38 PM in response to K T

Thanks.

While I had "Unicode (UTF-8)" selected as the character encoding in Preferences>Settings>Advanced:International,
"Japanese(Shift JIS)" was enabled as an encoding in in Preferences>Encodings.

Clearing that fixed it for new terminal windows.

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