Hallo mark!

 ml> on my box i had to specifically assign a modifier key to use so
 ml> as to be able to enter ""blended"" characters...

By blended do you mean multibyte?  Anyhow I won't quote back your modifier keys
 as they show as C1 control codes here.  I never use those but perhaps they
will work in other editors, maybe even joe.  That I don't know.

 ml> what i describe is what i had to do on a KDE GUI setup...

Ah!  Yeah I read something about that somewhere.  No KDE here, or anything like
 it, so I cannot confirm nor deny.  All I know for sure that on the linux
console those tricks won't work.  The left <ALT> plus the decimal number does
on both the console and in vim, as well as the correct control codes, and I'd
imagine the same might be true for codepages.  This being a native uft8
enviroment makes things much easier when that is the goal.  Also having iconv
handy makes it extremely convenient to convert to 8 bit codepages when needed. 
 However I try and avoid that since I have yet to see a 8 bit codepage that has
 it all and I am greedy.  ;-)

Het leven is goed,
Maurice

... Huil niet om mij, ik heb vi.
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