On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 02:52:22PM -0800, Chip Camden wrote: > inside rxvt-unicode (urxvt) v9.07 > > and I can't seem to get unicode characters to display properly. I have: > > set charset="utf-8"
This comes up often enough that it should probably be a FAQ... First off, don't set charset. You shouldn't need to, and -- unless you're doing something very funky and you really, really know what you're doing -- having to do this means your environment is not set up properly. Most likely, setting this manually will only work against you. Make sure your LANG environment variable (or its many cousins) is properly set to a UTF-8 locale. For example, this is my environment (on a redhat-ish system): $ locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE=C LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL= Note that values in quotes are "inherited" from the $LANG environment variable, and those without quotes are directly set. Also note that this all needs to be done *BEFORE* whatever launches your rxvt windows starts; e.g. if you're using some window manager gizmo to launch your windows, it needs to be done before the window manager starts. This may mean you need to set the system-wide default to a UTF-8 encoding, or hack your start-up scripts, depending on what system you're running on, and how its X startup stuff works (or doesn't). Next, you need to make sure you're using a proper font that has all the UTF-8 glyphs. I'm not familiar with rxvt's font configuration, but the font you listed may or may not have them... strikes me it wouldn't, depending on what you're trying to see. Until I became too lazy to not use whatever my system provided as its default terminal window, I configured my xterm with this font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-* In the past I had to install some unicode font package to make sure this font was present; these days I don't recall having to do that, but it's been a while since I installed a fresh system. This font is (or should be) the "universal unicode" font, which contains very many of the Unicode glyphs, including most for asian character support. In any event, if your locale settings ($LANG) is set properly, and your terminal window is using proper fonts that contain the glyphs you want to display, Mutt should "just work" without you having to set *anything* in Mutt's config. Oh, also... if you hand-compile Mutt, you probably need to make sure you're compiling against ncursesw(-dev) instead of ncurses(-dev) for Unicode to work properly (note the 'w' at the end). These days I use gnome-terminal primarily, which uses newer font rendering libraries (bonobo, I believe) to magically guess which fonts contain characters for the charset you're trying to display. In some sense this is "better" because you don't have to futz with stuff to get any given subset of unicode characters to display properly; though when you end up with a font that you hate for some sub-charset you use, figuring out how to fix that can be very painful. :( On the whole I still prefer xterm, but I haven't ever figured out how to make its modern font-rendering features work in a way that's "nice", and the bitmapped fonts really don't look as good IMO, so I gave in and reluctantly switched. I'm not ranting, per se... I mention this mainly because if you struggle to get this working, and if there's no strongly compelling reason for you to stick with rxvt, then you may find that switching to a more modern terminal emulator solves your problem rather immediately. Maybe you care, maybe you don't. I hope at least some of this was helpful. =8^) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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