How to hack GHCi (or Hugs) so that it prints Unicode chars unescaped?

Question

Look at the problem: Normally, in the interactive Haskell environment, non-Latin Unicode characters (that make a part of the results) are printed escaped, even if the locale

Answer 1

You could switch to using the 'text' package for IO. E.g.

Prelude> :set -XOverloadedStrings
Prelude> Data.Text.IO.putStrLn "hello: привет"
hello: привет

The package is part of the standard Haskell distribution, the Haskell Platform, and provides an efficient packed, immutable Unicode text type with IO operations. Many encodings are supported.

Using a .ghci file you could set -XOverloadStrings to be on by default, and write a :def macro to introduce a :text command that shows a value via text only. That would work.