Passing Unicode strings into command-line tools does work fine, as long as that tool uses wmain() or retrieves the command-line args via GetCommandlineW(). If the tool uses main(), it will get the command-line args converted to the local ANSI codepage, and the we have the mess again...
Printing Unicode strings to the console is a problem of its own. You can change the codepage of the Windows console to UTF-8 via SetConsoleOutputCP(), but then you still need to get your UTF-8 string into the console without the CRT messing up your string! printf() or cout<< don't work in my experience, because they are not UTF-8 aware and will mangle your UTF-8 strings. wprintf() or wcout<< will take UTF-16 (wchar_t) strings as input, but then convert them to the local ANSI codepage before passing them to console! My solution is using the Win32 API directly, i.e. print your string via GetStdHandle() and WriteFile(), bypassing the CRT. Either that or using "setmode(fileno(stdout), O_BINARY)" to change the stdout to binary mode, so printf() won't mangle your UTF-8 strings anymore. The latter has the drawback that, after that, using wprintf() or wcout<< will crash the CRT...
