some not user-friendly situation: 1) add USE="-unicode -slang ncurses" to /etc/make.conf 2) install whole system. 3) add "app-edit/nano unicode" to /etc/portage/packages.use 4) try to emerge nano or emerge -vaN world emerge process will be failed. Reason? "app-edit/nano" depends on "sys-libs/ncurses" not on "sys-libs/ncurses with unicode support".
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2272 ***