On OpenBSD, in order to appropriately see language specific characters in X sessions all I need to do is set LC_CTYPE to one of the values listed using locale -a. I do this by adding export LC_CTYPE=xx_YY.UTF-8 to the .Xsession file.
Is there any way to get similar result for tty sessions?
SSH, wscons(4), or other means of terminal access do not fall under
the X11 configuration. One means to configure the resulting shell of
such access methods is to set suitable environment variables in the
shell configuration. Assuming ksh(1), a typical way to do this
would be to set
export ENV=/home/user/.kshrc
in ~/.profile and then in the ~/.kshrc file set the necessary
export LC_CTYPE=... value. Other shells (e.g. fish or zsh) will
vary in how and in what file environment variables are set, check their
manual for details.
Another method would be to create a new (or configure an existing) login
class to set suitable environment variables for the user(s) in question;
see setenv under login.conf(5). doas.conf(5) may also need (a
different) setenv if the locale settings need to work as another user.
.kshrc file and what you suggested to .profile. It certainly modifies how characters are displayed but the result is different than expected. For example it changes the "-" (hyphen) in man pages, which is weird btw, but all language specific symbols are still incorrectly.