Characters read and written via the console (*terminal-io*) are encoded in an external format that is determined by the operating environment.
On Windows, the console uses the default system console code page.
On non-Windows platforms, LispWorks tries to determine the appropriate external format to use for the console on startup using the standard POSIX environment variables LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG (in that order). If the first of these that is set specifies a "codeset" (which means it contains a dot and the "codeset" is the bit after the dot) that matches a LispWorks external format, then LispWorks uses this external format. Otherwise, LispWorks uses :latin-1-terminal, which outputs non-latin-1 characters (those with code larger than 255) by printing the hex representation of the code in angle brackets.
The function set-console-external-format can be used to override the external format on non-Windows platforms. In most of the cases it is better to rely on what LispWorks has chosen, because it matches what other software does.
LispWorks® User Guide and Reference Manual - 01 Dec 2021 19:30:24