My bash installation on cygwin doesn’t handle accented letters properly. I tried adding set

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Asked: June 14, 20262026-06-14T19:03:04+00:00 2026-06-14T19:03:04+00:00

My bash installation on cygwin doesn’t handle accented letters properly. I tried adding set

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My bash installation on cygwin doesn’t handle accented letters properly. I tried adding

set input-meta on    # to accept 8-bit characters
set output-meta on   # to show 8-bit characters
set convert-meta on  # to show it as character, not the octal representation

to my input rc, but this doesn’t quite work yet. Indeed, if I type

$ echo ù

then before i press enter it is automatically changed to

$ echo \303

although the output is right, for I get

$ echo \303
ù

I get the same result for anyother accented letter. Usually though I use a non-italian keyboard, and I use autohotkey to substitute letters with an apostrophe after them with an accented letter. When this is the case, accented letters get substituted with a \302, and they print garbage depending on the letter: prints a 3y for a ù, a ¢ for an ò, and nothing for everething else.

How do I get all this to make sense?

EDIT: my locale settings, cygwin version and terminal are the following

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-6.1-WOW64 ferdi-Asus 1.7.17(0.262/5/3) 2012-10-19 14:39 i686 Cygwin
$ locale
LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="it_IT.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$ tty
/dev/pty1

I’m invoking it simply clicking the Cygwin terminal link. It redirects to

C:\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico -

The relevant part of the autohotkey script is the following

#NoEnv  ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%  ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.
...
::avra'::avrà
::avro'::avrò
...