tmux in putty displays border as 'qqqqq' or 'xxxx'

Question

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.

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

I had the same problem with Putty when launching tmux on Linux 12.04 machine. Even setting the charset to UTF-8 in PuTTY (in the settings under Window > Translation > Remote character set) didn't solve the problem.

Launching tmux with -u option did the trick (tmux -u)

Answer 3

In my case I could fix it by enabling a setting in PuTTY:

Window ->
   Translation ->
      Adjust how PuTTY handles line drawing characters ->
         [X] Enable VT100 line drawing even in UTF-8 mode

This makes sense, since the "lqqqk" sequences are what VT100 line drawing looks like if it is not interpreted as such.

Answer 4

I had the same problem. The root reason was that the Linux system was using locale "POSIX". The issue is resolved by:

# show system locale
locale

# using utf-8 as system locale
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

# attach tmux
tmux a