What patches to improve UTF-8 support are available?
Many of these already have been included in the respective main distribution. • The Advanced Utility Development subgroup of the OpenI18N (formerly Li18nux) project have prepared various internationalization patches for tools such as cut, fold, glibc, join, sed, uniq, xterm, etc. that might improve UTF-8 support. • A collection of UTF-8 patches for various tools as well as a UTF-8 support status list is in Bruno Haible’s Unicode-HOWTO. • Bruno Haible has also prepared various patches for stty, the Linux kernel tty, etc. • The multilingualization patch (w3m-m17n) for the text-mode web browser w3m allows you to view documents in all the common encodings on a UTF-8 terminal like xterm (also switch option “Use alternate expression with ASCII for entity” to OFF after pressing “o”). Another multilingual version (w3mmee) is available as well (have not tried that yet).
