Well ain't this my lucky day!? I get to promote my very own module CanvasDirTree. In which I emulate Gtk2's cool animated treeview widget on a Tk canvas. You can assign callbacks to the canvas elements, so you can essentially read any directory with straight Perl code ( which gets it's unicode right). A couple of demos show how to use it.

As far as the Tk unicode problem you describe, it may have something to do with whether your system's terminals are set to display unicode? I can't swim well in unicode waters yet, I trust the system is setup correctly. :-)

You might want to look at Tk Characters or wait for unicode master graff to answer this.

PS. There is an old trick to put in your script:

$Tk::encodeFallback=1
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