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freebsdputtytmux

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.

Solution

  • 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).