How to solve (some) graphical issues with putty, UTF8, and ncurses

Hello everybody,

I’m writing this article to help all those people that may have had problems with text garbled, mismatched or other kind of graphical issues with all those software that uses the famous ncurses libraries (libncurses5). It all started when I was using (via puTTY) my favorite command line log parsing tool: the great  multitail (go out there and take it if you don’t know it) I started noticing some odd errors: part of the text was garbled, some of the lines were wrong in size or were substituted by wrong characters, as you can see in the screenshot:

strange-behaviour
multitail in a centOS environment

This problem happened when using puTTY on a CentOS 6.6 system, with locale set on UTF-8,  libncurses version 5.x and multitail at 6.4.1

This is the result of multiple problems and some steps are required to fix all the issues :

  1.  Download the latest version of puTTY (0.64 as of today)
  2. Make sure that under Windows -> Translation  and Connection -> Data you have everything as in the images :
    putty-screenshot1

    Remote character set: UTF-8 and “use Unicode line drawing code points”
    screenshot2Terminal-type string: putty
  3. Then, you have to set an environment variable to tell the ncurses libraries to use UTF-8 :

export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1

you should also make it stick (echo export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1 >> ~/.bashrc )

This should solve all your issues with UTF-8 and the ncurses libraries.

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