ee supports single-byte character code sets (eight-bit clean), or the Chinese Big-5 code set. (Other multi-byte code sets may function, but the reason Big-5 works is that a two-byte character also takes up two columns on the screen.)
Basically that says if a character takes up 1 column on the screen, it must be 1 byte, and if a character takes up 2 columns on the screen, it must be made up of 2 bytes. This means variable-length character encodings such as UTF-8 aren't guaranteed to work. For example,
ç is 2 bytes in UTF-8, but it only takes up 1 column on the screen, which results in incorrect rendering. But if I execute
LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-15 xterm -e ee, then
ç is rendered properly as I type because it is 1 byte in ISO-8859-15 and takes up 1 column on the screen.
On the other hand, I just tried the character
¿ and that resulted in
M being displayed.
M-? is what gets displayed when the screen is redrawn, except the
-? is overwritten with text when I continue typing. However, it does recognize that
<191> (character code BF in hexadecimal) was used when I set 8-bit characters: OFF, so that
¿ should have been displayed… Based on that, I wouldn't use
ee(1) for anything other than 7-bit ASCII text.
Out of all of the "normal" console text editors I tried, only
editors/mined detected the character encoding for both UTF-8 and ISO-8859-15, regardless of the system locale, and correctly displayed things…in X. When I tried it in a FreeBSD TTY with my drm-kmod graphics driver loaded, it seems to work well when the locale's character encoding is UTF-8, even for Cyrillic text, but there is a noticeable delay when it initially starts. Of course, it defaults to ISO-8859-1 if you open up a KOI8-R text file unless the locale's character encoding is KOI8-R already, which means Cyrillic characters are broken in the TTY because the locale's character encoding must be set to UTF-8 for Cyrillic characters to render properly; that's actually true for
vi(1) as well, so it's not just
editors/mined that has a problem with rendering.
editors/mined works a lot faster in a tmux session in the TTY, but you lose most color support and Cyrillic characters didn't work at all. Other than that,
editors/mined works great, though you might say it has too many options hidden throughout its many menus.
Of course, if you use UTF-8 everywhere, you can use pretty much any editor, but something like
editors/nano is reasonably friendly and doesn't have too many features and keybindings to learn.
editors/micro and
editors/uemacs both seem to work well too, if you are using a UTF-8 character encoding in your file and your locale's character encoding is UTF-8.
If there's a problem with any of these editors, it is the fact that many of the keybindings aren't displayed on-screen, so you will have a small bit of learning to do, unlike when using an editor such as
ee(1). But at least they can display Cyrillic characters, unlike
ee(1)
