[COLUG] UTF-8 Goobers-up Screen

[Aaron Howard]

On Tuesday 12 June 2007 9:35:37 am Josh wrote:
> Howdy All,
>
> I'm using a remote Screen session from Putty on a Windows box.  I use it
> to read mail in Pine, as well as browse the web in eLinks.
>
> Whenever I encounter UTF-8 characters (with accent marks), the Screen gets
> goobered up and, for example, scrolls up by a few lines.  (This is fun in
> Pine, as I won't know which message I'm looking at or deleting.)
>
> Without using Screen, everything works OK.  Since I thought it might be a
> terminal setting, I checked; when I just use pine, TERM is set to XTerm.
> So, I ran screen and set the terminal type to XTerm, and get the same
> results.
>
> Any ideas?
>
>

I'm not a screen user myself so I don't know if this relates, but I had some 
bizarre problems with the Linux console, ncurses, line drawing characters and 
UTF-8.  (Search COLUG list for the thread.)

I solved my issue by entering this command:

echo -ne "\033c"

That is a VT100 RIS ("R"eset to "I"nitial "S"tate) command.  Fixes some quirks 
w/ Linux console handling.  According to the ncurses FAQ, Linux' console 
is "only nominally VT-100 compatible."

You might try TERM=hurd.

Good luck,
-Aaron