title: Unicode in PowerShell with Python? Alternative shells in Windows?
body: <p>I want a shell that supports Unicode on Windows. PowerShell as it ships doesn't seem to.</p>
  
  <p>PowerShell V2 (Windows&nbsp;7 x64):</p>
  
  <pre><code>PS C:\&gt; powershell
  Windows PowerShell
  Copyright (C) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
  
  PS C:\&gt; python
  Python 2.6.2 (r262:71605, Apr 14 2009, 22:46:50) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  &gt;&gt;&gt; unicode_char=unichr(0xf12)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; unicode_char
  u'\u0f12'
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print unicode_char
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
    File "C:\python26\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 12, in encode
      return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\u0f12' in position 0: character maps to &lt;undefined&gt;
  &gt;&gt;&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get similar results with <a href="https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd315244.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PowerShell ISE</a>, even though some places around the web claim it to be Unicode supporting or whatever...</p>
  
  <p>The Python Integrated Development Environment (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDLE_%28Python%29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">IDLE</a>) 2.6.2 seems to work fine:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; unicode_char=unichr(0xf12)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print unicode_char
  ༒
  &gt;&gt;&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>IDLE is very slow, and I would prefer another shell, any ideas? Can I make this work in PowerShell?</p>