Mailing List Archive

On Friday, 30 December 2022 04:08:51 GMT Walter Dnes wrote:
> I'm b-a-a-a-a-ck... on my regular desktop. I re-installed with
> unicode enabled and locale corrected. Some rough edges, specifically no
> line-drawing characters. See attached image. Mutt is supposed to have
> horizontal lines from right after the ")" up to the ">". Similarly mc
> is supposed to have vertical and horizontal line drawing characters
> separating and surrounding the two panels. I can use "mc -a" to get a
> decent emulation with "+", "_", and "|" in place of line-drawing
> characters. Similarly mutt has the "set ascii_chars" option to get an
> ugly version of line-threading. Since this problem shows up on more
> than one app, I assume that it's a general system problem. Any ideas on
> how to get real line-drawing characters back?

I can't recall what else you have eliminated as the cause of this rendering
problem. Have you checked:

1. VT console.
2. Different terminal (urxvt, xterm, gnome terminal, konsole, etc.).
3. Different DE/Window Manager.

Also may be worth trying Wayland as opposed to Xorg, in case the video card
driver likes one more than the other.

On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 01:05:26PM +0000, Michael wrote

> I can't recall what else you have eliminated as the cause of this
> rendering problem. Have you checked:
>
> 1. VT console.
> 2. Different terminal (urxvt, xterm, gnome terminal, konsole, etc.).
> 3. Different DE/Window Manager.

A bit of digging. For text tty's (tty1, tty2, etc) I use solar24x32
as the font. On a text tty both mc and mutt work fine (line-drawing)
natively without any hacks. They also work fine on urxvt without any
hacks. Note that the ebuild that provides urxvt is called, wait for it,

rxvt-unicode

It looks like urxvt is designed from square 1 to handle unicode, and
xterm is not.

--
I've seen things, you people wouldn't believe; Gopher, Netscape with
frames, the first Browser Wars. Searching for pages with AltaVista,
pop-up windows self-replicating, trying to uninstall RealPlayer. All
those moments, will be lost in time like tears in rain... time to die.

On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 06:37:59PM +0000, Michael wrote

> I rarely use xterm and can't recall how it behaves with mutt, so I'm
> not sure if the above flags would make any difference. If xterm is
> your favourite terminal you may want to give these flags a spin.

I've already tried xterm with +/- unicode. No difference. I may have
to migrate to urxvt.

--
I've seen things, you people wouldn't believe; Gopher, Netscape with
frames, the first Browser Wars. Searching for pages with AltaVista,
pop-up windows self-replicating, trying to uninstall RealPlayer. All
those moments, will be lost in time like tears in rain... time to die.

On Friday, 30 December 2022 13:29:30 GMT Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 01:05:26PM +0000, Michael wrote
>
> > I can't recall what else you have eliminated as the cause of this
> > rendering problem. Have you checked:
> >
> > 1. VT console.
> > 2. Different terminal (urxvt, xterm, gnome terminal, konsole, etc.).
> > 3. Different DE/Window Manager.
>
> A bit of digging. For text tty's (tty1, tty2, etc) I use solar24x32
> as the font. On a text tty both mc and mutt work fine (line-drawing)
> natively without any hacks. They also work fine on urxvt without any
> hacks. Note that the ebuild that provides urxvt is called, wait for it,
>
> rxvt-unicode
>
> It looks like urxvt is designed from square 1 to handle unicode, and
> xterm is not.

OKie dOKie, it is a terminal rendering issue then. I'm not on a PC with mutt
right now, so can't confirm, but these are the xterm USE flags I use here:

~ $ equery u x11-terms/xterm
[ Legend : U - final flag setting for installation]
[ : I - package is installed with flag ]
[ Colors : set, unset ]
* Found these USE flags for x11-terms/xterm-376:
U I
- - Xaw3d : Add support for the 3d athena widget set
+ + openpty : Use openpty() in preference to posix_openpt()
- - sixel : Enable sixel graphics support
- - toolbar : Enable the xterm toolbar to be built
+ + truetype : Add support for FreeType and/or FreeType2 fonts
+ + unicode : Add support for Unicode
- - verify-sig : Verify upstream signatures on distfiles
- - xinerama : Add support for querying multi-monitor screen geometry
through the Xinerama API

I rarely use xterm and can't recall how it behaves with mutt, so I'm not sure
if the above flags would make any difference. If xterm is your favourite
terminal you may want to give these flags a spin.