Yudit can read, write, cut and paste your text in various Unicode
representation schemes (UTF-8, Java \u1234, UTF-7, or UTF-16) and
older non-Unicode charsets like ISO
8859, KOI8, JIS, GB, BIG5, KSC, EUC, HZ,
which can all be selected from the encoding menu.  If you want to
decipher a text whose encoding you cannot recognize, simply repeat
reloading the file with each possible encoding until you get to see
readable text.  Yudit's code conversion functionality is also
accessible from shell scripts through the bundled uniconv
recoding command. 

Yudit uses UTF-8 as its most sensible default encoding.  To enable yourself
to read UTF-8 mails, you can now simply add the following entry to
your mailcap
file:

Yudit allows you to enter any language's characters on any ASCII
keyboard using customizable input sequences (kmaps, see below) like "E$" for the U+20AC EURO SIGN, "byeol" for the U+BCC4 HANGUL SYLLABLE BYEOL or
"Gorbac<e:v" to type the name of the inventor of perestroika with
my Cyrillic.kmap for example.  With
[Control] & [i] you can quickly switch between the current and the
previous input definition to type bilingual documents or to turn off a
certain input definition temporarily. 

You can also enter characters by Unicode number, SGML name, or RFC 1345 mnemonic, and you can cut and paste characters from
other text files, and you can enter characters through the Xinput
protocol for the large Chinese dictionaries. 

Besides screen viewing, Yudit can also print plain text in readable
PostScript using the TrueType fonts, but it does not honor any
formatting codes like HTML or TeX. The printing functionality is also
accessible through the uniprint command that comes with the
bundle. 

Yudit is customizable in a way that you can easily add support for any language you want to type,
for any additional charsets you need, and for any font you want to
use, in a central $YUDITDATA directory or in your local $HOME/.yudit/
without having to recompile the yudit binary.  The current
configuration syntax has quite a few imperfections, though. 

Yudit does not do the bidirectional reordering and glyph reshaping
needed for full Unicode support yet.  But if you don't mind this
condition, you can even use Yudit for complex scripts such as Arabic,
with the help of my arabjoin perl
script. 

Apart from the Unicode features, yudit is a very basic and
straightforward editor whose editing functionality is comparable to
that of the Xaw xedit and the UW pico rather than to vi or emacs. 
Yudit does have three useful help pages and a find/replace popup but
it does not seem to have ambitions to provide macro or regexp
facilities or more comfortable editor features like an undo ring. 

"There appear to be few if any technical reasons to
move from UNIX to Windows NT.  The performance of Linux exceeds that
of NT 4.0 and Linux appears to be more reliable. ..." -  David Korn
<dgk@research.att.com> on page 144 of the Proceedings of the USENIX
Windows NT Workshop - August 11-13, 1997.