screen and UTF-8

Since I got annoyed by umlauts being printed as ░, I figured I’d install a UTF-8 capable font on this box here and all my problems would be gone. But not so fast.

screen is a real fucked up thing. If you’re starting screen via screen -U everything is nice and cosy, and you get your UTF-8 goodness. But, don’t think you’ll get away with just enabling UTF-8 as default and enabling UTF-8 for each new window by doing this:

You won’t get any UTF-8 char (at least w/ irssi) out of that .. 😡

4 thoughts to “screen and UTF-8”

  1. I ran into the same difficulty not too long ago. Your problem isn’t screen, it’s that irssi’s character detection sucks (assuming of course your shell has Unicode support enabled, and you’re using a font that supports the particular UTF-8 characters you’re expecting — Bitstream Vera Sans Mono covers a wide range for instance).

    You might try weechat, an irssi clone that does things right. I use it under screen (which is set to ‘defutf8 on’) and UTF-8 just works.

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