Emacs + windowed mode + non-ascii characters + utf8 file encoding

I've developed a little mode for emacs which applies enriched format (colors, different fonts, etc) to some pieces of text using regular expressions (as markdown does).

In some of these regular expressions, there's french and spanish characters (like ``), and unicode characters (like ☛). Usually I use emacs in no windows mode (-nw), but to edit files which uses my mode, I open emacs in windowed mode, and I've realized that in windowed mode I can't write non-ascii characters, like ` or ☛. So, I can't use these special patterns (files are utf8).

If I execute describe-input-method in emacs, it says that no input method is specified, both in windowed and nw mode. However, it's not crazy to say the input method is different in windows and nw mode, since in boths modes the characters I'm able to write are different; or have I misunderstood what the meaning of input mode in emacs is?

via Chebli Mohamed