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Sourabh
Asked: 2014-01-25 04:32:17 +0800 CST

UTF-8 character not showing properly in tmux

  • 772

I use ♪ character in my zsh theme's for prompt. But in tmux, my prompt was behaving weirdly, showing extra spaces, like this:

♪ ~   I can type from here
♪ ~ Instead of here like in zsh, and sometimes when I do stuff like cd
♪ ~   cd ~
♪ ~ cdcd /
♪ ~ ^^These 2 chars just show up but are not actually part of command and not delete-able

I recently discovered that I can set tmux encoding to utf8 by set-window-option -g utf8 on. Doing that, the space problem was gone but ♪ character changed to _. How can I get my ♪ back in tmux?

My zsh-theme:

PROMPT='%{$fg_bold[cyan]%} ♪ %{$fg[blue]%}%c%{$fg_bold[blue]%}$(git_prompt_info)$(git_remote_status)%{$fg_bold[blue]%} % %{$reset_color%}'
prompt

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Starting tmux with u flag solves this issue

    tmux -u

    I've created an alias of tmux in my zshrc

    alias tmux='tmux -u'
    • 64

  2. Thanks for the flag part, but we can also set the below to the profile rc (e.g. .zshrc or bashrc) file

    export LC_ALL=en_IN.UTF-8
export LANG=en_IN.UTF-8

    With this option set, no need to use the -u flag.

    • 9

  3. If u use diffrent shell like "fish" or sh u can change enviroment variable of tmux

    $ tmux setenv 'LC_ALL' 'en_IN.UTF-8'

    $ tmux setenv 'LANG' 'en_IN.UTF-8'

    $ tmux show-environment

    DISPLAY=:0.0
-KRB5CCNAME
LANG=en_IN.UTF-8                          <-enviroment variable
LC_ALL=en_IN.UTF-8
SSH_AGENT_PID=1269
-SSH_ASKPASS
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-tGUWJ874wmOG/agent.1193
-SSH_CONNECTION
VIRTUAL_ENV=/home/Jai_BholeNath/.tmux.conf
-WINDOWID
XAUTHORITY=/home/Jai_BholeNath/.Xauthority
    • 0