CODEWITHSUNDEEP
freebsdputtytmux
randomness2077
randomness2077

Reputation: 1139

tmux in putty displays border as 'qqqqq' or 'xxxx'

This post is similar to this and this, however, without putty, the border could display properly. Therefore, I doubt this was caused by an old version of tmux.

I am running FreeBSD 9.2-release and tmux 1.9a (latest on FreeBSD).

I hope someone can give me solution as to why this happens and how to fix it.

Upvotes: 12

Views: 9744

Answers (5)

hym3242
hym3242

Reputation: 166

The root cause may actually be related to Terminal character set switching: use vttest(1) to test character sets and see if your terminal support switching to DEC Special graphics and line drawing characters.

The escape sequence used by gdb and ncdu, etc, is \033(0 to switch to "Character set 0 (DEC Special graphics and line drawing)"

You would want to configure your terminal emulator correctly. In the context of tmux, you are basically putting a terminal emulator inside another. So you would want to make sure they are both configured correctly.

The alternative, of course, is maybe to tell your application to use UTF-8 line drawing characters.

If you are using PuTTY, remember to check the box "enable VT-100 line drawing even in utf-8 mode" in Window->Translation.

Upvotes: 0

Sunday
Sunday

Reputation: 811

In my case I could fix it by enabling a setting in PuTTY:

Window ->
   Translation ->
      Adjust how PuTTY handles line drawing characters ->
         [X] Enable VT100 line drawing even in UTF-8 mode

This makes sense, since the "lqqqk" sequences are what VT100 line drawing looks like if it is not interpreted as such.

Upvotes: 6

Steven Yang
Steven Yang

Reputation: 71

I had the same problem. The root reason was that the Linux system was using locale "POSIX". The issue is resolved by:

# show system locale
locale

# using utf-8 as system locale
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

# attach tmux
tmux a

Upvotes: 2

renadeen
renadeen

Reputation: 1844

I had the same problem with Putty when launching tmux on Linux 12.04 machine. Even setting the charset to UTF-8 in PuTTY (in the settings under Window > Translation > Remote character set) didn't solve the problem.

Launching tmux with -u option did the trick (tmux -u)

Upvotes: 12

Adrian Frühwirth
Adrian Frühwirth

Reputation: 45626

From the tmux FAQ:

I use PuTTY and my tmux window pane separators are all qqqqqqqqq's!

PuTTY is using a character set translation that doesn't support ACS line drawing. With a Unicode font, try setting PuTTY to use a different translation on the Window -> Translation configuration page. For example, change UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 or CP437. It may also be necessary to adjust the way PuTTY treats line drawing characters in the lower part of the same configuration page.

That being said, I use tmux 1.8 with PuTTY 0.62, "UTF-8 translation", "Unicode line drawing code points" and a remote locale of en_US.utf8 which works perfectly fine.

You probably have PuTTY configured to use Unicode without using a UTF-8 locale on your FreeBSD box, or the other way round (if I switch my remote locale to C without touching my PuTTY settings I get the behaviour that you describe).

Upvotes: 11

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