Access of special characters

On Feb 27, 9:37am, Robert N. Eaton wrote:

> Thanks, Shawn, I thought it was just me. I tried the alt+ method both at
> the bash prompt and in vi.

I haven't been following this thread closely, but vile and xvile (which
are vi-like editors) allow you to enter arbitrary 8-bit characters. Below
is the relevant information from vile's help document. Both vile and
xvile are available on Red Hat's Power Tools CD. (But if you want
Perl support, you have to build it yourself.) For more information
regarding this editor, see http://vile.cx.

8-Bit Operation
---------------
    vile allows input, manipulation, and display of all 256 possible
    byte-wide characters.  (Double-wide characters are not supported.)

    Output
    ------
    By default, characters with the high bit set (decimal value 128 or
    greater) will display as hex (or octal; see "non-printing- octal"
    above) sequences, e.g.  \xA5.  A range of characters which should
    display as themselves (that is, characters understood by the user's
    display terminal) may be given using the "printing-low" and
    "printing-high" settings (see above).  Useful values for these
    settings are 160 and 255, which correspond to the printable range
    of the ISO-Latin-1 character set.

    Input
    -----

    There are basically three ways of getting 8-bit characters into
    a vile buffer:

    Directly -- if the user's input device (i.e. the terminal or
        xterm) can generate all characters, and if the terminal
        settings are such that these characters pass through
        unmolested, then vile will happily incorporate them into the
        user's text, or act on them if they are bound to functions.  On
        an xterm, try "stty cs8 -parenb -istrip".  Real serial lines
        may take more convincing, at both ends, but use that stty
        command as a starting point.

    As numbers -- the ^V prefix (or, more correctly, the key bound to
        the "quote-next-character" function), if followed by up to
        three digits, will insert a character whose value is that
        number (no greater than 255) into the buffer.  The number may
        be entered in decimal (^VNNN), octal with a leading '0' (^V0NNN),
        or hex with a leading 'x' (^VxNN).

    As digraphs -- Perhaps more useful to some people is using a set of
        ":map!" commands to aid insertion of 8-bit text.  The file
        "digraphs.rc" distributed with the vile source contains a set
        of mappings which should aid the input of ISO 8859/1 text.  As
        examples, the mappings in digraphs.rc allow one to type ^KU" or
        ^Ku" to get an umlaut character, ^K12 to get the little '1/2'
        symbol, ^KY- to get the Yen currency symbol, or ^K:- to get an
        arithmetic division symbol.

    Users who have no need to enter 8-bit text may want access to the
    meta-bound functions while in insert mode as well as command mode.
    The mode "meta-insert-bindings" controls whether functions bound to
    meta- keys (characters with the high bit set) are executed only in
    command mode, or in both command and insert modes.  In either case,
    if a character is _not_ bound to a function, then it will be
    self-inserting when in insert mode.  (To bind to a meta key in the
    .vilerc file, one may specify it as itself, or in hex or octal, or
    with the shorthand 'M-c' where c is the corresponding character
    without the high bit set.

    (Although it is possible to edit and view all 256 characters, it is
    currently impossible to _search_ for a string that contains the NULL
    character, since this is used internally to terminate the search
    string.)