866 charset installed by default in Windows' cmd.exe is poor and inconvinient as compared with glorious Unicode.
Can I install Unicode by default or replace cmd.exe to another console and make it default so programms use it instead of cmd.exe?
I understand that chcp 65001 changes encoding only in the running console. I want to change charset at the system level.
After I tried algirdas' solution, my Windows crashed (Win 7 Pro 64bit) so I decided to try a different solution:
Run (Win+R)cmd /K chcp 65001You will get mostly what you want. To start it from the taskbar or anywhere else, make a shortcut (you can name it cmd.unicode.exe or whatever you like) and change its Target to C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /K chcp 65001.
START cmd /K chcp 65001 START DTRé.xls
WriteFile is supposed to return. This causes applications to retry writing what they mistakenly determine is the remaining part of the byte string, repeatedly until the console returns that all 'bytes' (actually decoded wide characters) have been written. The result looks like a trailing stream of garbage characters after each print that contains non-ASCII characters.ReadFile returns that it 'successfully' read 0 bytes. Most programs interpret this as EOF, and a REPL/shell will typically exit in this case.
Open an elevated Command Prompt (run cmd as administrator). query your registry for available TT fonts to the console by:
REG query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" You'll see an output like :
0 REG_SZ Lucida Console 00 REG_SZ Consolas 936 REG_SZ *新宋体 932 REG_SZ *ＭＳ ゴシック Now we need to add a TT font that supports the characters you need like Courier New, we do this by adding zeros to the string name, so in this case the next one would be "000" :
REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 000 /t REG_SZ /d "Courier New" Now we implement UTF-8 support:
REG ADD HKCU\Console /v CodePage /t REG_DWORD /d 65001 /f Set default font to "Courier New":
REG ADD HKCU\Console /v FaceName /t REG_SZ /d "Courier New" /f Set font size to 20 :
REG ADD HKCU\Console /v FontSize /t REG_DWORD /d 20 /f Enable quick edit if you like :
REG ADD HKCU\Console /v QuickEdit /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f 
req query is showing me only sqares on rows 3 and 4
Save the following into a file with ".reg" suffix:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console\%SystemRoot%_system32_cmd.exe] "CodePage"=dword:0000fde9 Double click this file, and regedit will import it.
It basically sets the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console\%SystemRoot%_system32_cmd.exe\CodePage to 0xfde9 (65001 in decimal system).
Console\Command Prompt but it doesn't work on my system :)For me, for Visual Studio 2022, it worked when I executed this ".reg" command.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console\C:_Program Files_Microsoft Visual Studio_2022_Professional_Common7_IDE_CommonExtensions_Platform_Debugger_VsDebugConsole.exe] "CodePage"=dword:0000fde9 It is based on @Shaohua Li's answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24711864/2941313. It does the same thing but for different path (specifically for VS2022 console).
chcp 65001provides some UTF-8 decoding but it's very rudimentary and doesn't provide proper input.