In Unix, there's a write command that lets you send messages to other users logged in to the system. In Debian, a version of this command is included in the bsdmainutils package. I'm lucky enough to know people that like to communicate with me this way.
It's a known bug that write
only supports the
basic characters that are part
of ascii.
So you can't use all the characters of different
languages like Danish or Spanish.
The write utility does not recognize multibyte characters.
—from write's man page
You can fix this by changing the character buffer to use a multi-byte type
instead of the old-school 8-bit char
.
Details are here.
There are still some improvements that I need to make with this
patch. wchar_t
isn't
ideal for UTF-8 data, though it works. Apparently it's
better (i.e. possibly more portable in the long run) to
use char16_t
or char32_t
,
including
uchar.h
instead of wchar.h
.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/527307/173630
Also, I need to investigate some interactions between this patch and how
it's displayed over ssh when you're connecting through Mac OS X.