[john-aj]

Indeed. Nvi, which was recommended elsewhere in the thread, supports UTF-8 and is my preferred vi clone. (Actually, OpenBSD vi is an old version of nvi without UTF-8 support.)

[trn]

I plan to eventually support multibyte in a way I can contribute upstream to OpenBSD.

The 1.8 branch of the Nvi editor, as well as the Nvi2 fork have mulitbyte support.

I could be mistaken but I believe both of these multibyte implementations descend from the late itojun's (http://www.itojun.org/itojun.html) Nvi-m17n project (archived at https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/tree/editors/nvi-m17n/files). A paper was presented at USENIX99 (http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix99/full_papers/hagino/hag...) describing the work, which was actually developed as part of the KAME project.