Set up Putty and Server to only use UTF-8

Question

I am trying to only use UTF-8 for anything (Client on Win7 64 bit, servers Debian 64bit, su rights for everything). On Stackoverflow I can find many solutions to fix vim for UTF-8 handling. I also have no trouble with my apps iusing PHP and MySQL to only use UTF-8.

But in Putty, as soon as I set "Remote character set" to UTF-8, the terminal output of special chars gets messed up.

On a new server /etc/locale.gen looks as follows:

de_DE ISO-8859-1
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
de_DE.UTF-8@euro UTF-8
de_DE@euro ISO-8859-15

Question: How can I restrict the system to only use utf-8 for everything?

Do I still have to tell every app to use utf-8 individually (eg. vim, mutt, aptitude etc.)?

Answer 1

Note that /etc/locale.gen only says which locales to make available. It doesn't say which one your session will use as the default. For that, check /etc/default/locale since you are on Debian, or better yet, configure all of this with dpkg-reconfigure locales.

To check which locale your session is using, type locale. $LC_CTYPE overrides $LANG and $LC_ALL overrides everything.