Cyrillic HTML Tips

This was my first Cyrillic website, and I had to learn a few things about Unicode and "code-pages" just to get a flippin' text editor to work.

The best advice seems to be, make the entire page Unicode (UTF-8), ie, 2-byte "wide" characters. This lets you mix alphabets in a single file, whereas other 7/8-bit encodings would allow either Cyrillic or Roman alphabets, but not both. (This is how TextPad "supports", Unicode, which isn't very convenient.) Note that the resulting files will be treated as "binary" by numerous programs, so keep lots of backups before running utilities like "dos2unix" on them :-)

Windows
- Notepad seems to handle Unicode great; much better than TextPad, amazingly enough. No syntax coloring or intelligent tabbing, of course.
- UniPad.org works very nice...in increments of 5min, when the shareware "session" expires and you have to re-launch. It's nice enough I'd be willing to register, but...$199 for a freakin' text-editor? No, it's back to Notepad for me...
- PuTTY
  - In Window->Translation, change "received" to UTF-8
MacOS X
- TextWrangler (the new "BBEdit Lite") does a good job with Unicode
- In Terminal->Windows Settings->Display, uncheck both "wide glyphs" settings
Unix/Linux
- vim
  - :set enc=utf-8
  - may also need :set ambiwidth=single